Bruce E. Whitacre reads from Good Housekeeping

Over the summer, I heard Bruce E. Whitacre read poems from his new book, Good Housekeeping, at Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, which is, by the way, one of the best bookstores in Manhattan. 

Since then, I’ve wanted to get him on the blog, but NYC living being what it is, it often takes time for two people to get themselves aligned, but yes, it happily finally happened.

In the video below Bruce reads from Good Housekeeping. Have a listen. And enjoy.

I’m including four of the poems in Good Housekeeping after the video to give an idea of the book’s range. The poems are crafted with an ear for the sounds words make and their effect on the meaning and sense of what is being said.

Does the door of the house in Good Housekeeping lead us to a place that’s safe and warm with happy tasks to do that make life fulfilling and give it a reason, or is it like a mouth ready to gobble us up or, at the very least, spit us out, all used up with the efforts it takes to maintain a house, that history, and if you’re an American, the genocide involved in its building. Good Housekeeping is engaged with this tension, and it keeps me interested.

…

 

Good Housekeeping

I sing the body domestic in sonnets Hooveric
The hausfrau on the corner is heartless to my dog
But her pressed curtains part on a promise of paradise
Without home fires there would be neither war nor peace
It left the boot print of settlers on stolen lands
Of those they called savage. Housekeeping is why
Greed is the root of evil yet it keeps us alive
Bow of that Mayfair Amazon, Mrs. Dalloway
A feather duster is our sword of Damocles
Dismiss its implications at your peril
Our polished windows gaze out unobscured
On the dwindling Anthropocene vista
The clear-cut wastes we’ve washed down the disposal
It can’t go on like this this is all we have.

 

Nightingale on East 19th

At dusk the purple shadows spill out
around the gingko tree skirts.
Yellow-violet streetlights ignite
afterwork smokers on stoops.
The corner bar casts a blue glow from
some game broadcast from somewhere
Across the street the deli flowers beam
red, yellow, and pink little fires.
Standing still with my bag at a light,
I silence the jostle of pears and ginger ale.
Stray meadow tracks pierce my ear:
the notes of an improbable nightingale.
Transmuting twilight into sound
chanting the promise and loss of night
silence aches with each caesura
then singing again, arcs of awe.
A heedless siren squelches the spell, then
you flutter in the fan-leafed trees.
Again you ignite the air in sound,
sanctify this hectic honest hour.

 

Sorted

There. Don’t put this on top of this.
This is not for those to be put like that.
Here is for those that go there.
That is where you should put these.
Here is for things that don’t belong there.
There is nothing like these here.
Here is where nothing should be put like that.
Those things stay over there.
This shouldn’t go there like that.
That’s why those things stay over here.
These things like that go here.
That there belongs with those, not these.
Those should not go there on top of this.
There, there, those go here like these there.

 

Remember to Live

Morning glories, hibiscus, rose of Sharon
summer blooms that last only seconds when cut
stand for the chain
wrapping the world around the stars and back:
My joy
fleeting but continuous
like a bird’s song
or the ship engine thrum
cruising the straits of Polynesia
ever present when I listen.
Even foaming volcanoes promise wider beaches.
To wake in this place
is to be a trout in a stream,
a bird on a branch,
steel tempered in forge
for the mystical epic.
Something is always coming.

 

Good Housekeeping is published by Poets Wear Prada: You can check it out here:

https://www.poetswearprada.com/2024/04/goodhousekeeping.html

For more about Bruce Whitacre and his work, you can check him out here: 

https://www.brucewhitacre.com/good-housekeeping

 

Bruce Whitacre