Saturday, May 30, 2015
Intimate Portrait
Intimate Portrait
To grow up knowing how
to hold your own death
like a library card...
and to softly place it
in a cupboard.
Perhaps field mice
would get it before
it got you. You imagined
you could learn on-the-run.
AN EXTRA BLUE MILE, A Red Shuttleworth Poetry Chapbook
An Extra Blue Mile
poems
Red Shuttleworth
Realizing that a preceding chapbook, Blue Book, ought to have also contained five other poems from the blue books project, Red Shuttleworth bundled them into a new chapbook, An Extra Blue Mile, issued in a very limited edition (29 copies) by Bunchgrass Press.
The poems in An Extra Blue Mile are:
Stay or Go
Ambulance on Highway #17
Nikolai Gogol
Mikhail Bulgakov
and
Sunlight-Scatter... Saturday
Red Shuttleworth
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
BLUE BOOK, A Red Shuttleworh Poetry Chapbook
Blue Book
Eight Poems
Red Shuttleworth
Eight poems from a recent Red Shuttleworth series composed in longhand in 28-year-old Drake University examination blue books are presented in a new chapbook, Blue Book, published by Bunchgrass Press in a limited edition.
One of the rediscovered 28-year-old Drake University
exam blue books used by Red Shuttleworth to compose new poems.
The poems included in Blue Book are:
Soren Kierkegaard
Sigmund Freud (On America)
Gary Cooper
Harry Truman
Salvador Dali
Joseph Beuys
Only for the Gone
and
South of the Snake River
South of the Snake River
Red Shuttleworth
Visiting Writer, Drake University, Spring Semester 1987
Monday, May 18, 2015
South of the Snake River
South of the Snake River
Early May... you slow-drive Lyons Ferry Road,
drought not so evident. Windows rolled down,
you look-'n-listen for ancient Nez Perce ponies.
Double-wide farmhouses... shower-damp road,
aged bloodshot eyes in the rear view mirror.
You park the car, walk a crushed rock road.
Head-down, you scrawl and organize
--jerky penmanship-- simple toolbox words.
Daydream-tangible, the sky turns choppy-grey.
Friday, May 15, 2015
Mikhail Bulgakov
Mikhail Bulgakov
Furious, devil-growl thunder to a threadbare east,
cartoonish voices on crackle-patriotic television....
Kiev: May Day afternoon. Your yellow-rose house
casts a pale shadow for the drunk and fevered.
They're selling potatoes, painted rugs, old shoes,
manuscript ashes on a street of broken stones.
In Moscow they peddle CD's of Joe Stalin singing...
We're alone... among the thorns of the bush.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Only for the Gone
Only for the Gone
The physical weight of a daydream:
Basho's decay-to-dust walking stick.
So it is that you establish
two children in a winter procession
carrying ancient bronzed toddler shoes.
The inner life: slumped over-and-into fried eggs
at a roadside cafe, you're way too old for funerals.
Abundance: a crush-heavy sky over desert.
Someday, We used to live around there.
Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol
Set warm and face-down in the earth,
heart still beating, you were abandoned...
pain-twisted like a Ukrainian curved pine.
Laughter: the weight and heat of your fire:
light and darkest night... spilled ale...
rum cake. Heaven never gets fleshed-out.
Vladimir Putin brings wild blue orchids
to your grave. Big-gesture tsars are lost
forever in the scrawl of secretaries...
dead souls... gap-tooth nightmare grins.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Sunset on Mars
Sunset on Mars (NASA photograph)
Sunset on Mars
You awaken to mountains without tree line...
death-breeze... slow-settling red-ocher grit-veils.
Sadness grounded, you slow-roll toward eternity...
a water-gone Mars... burnt chocolate on cinnamon.
Distant metallic scuffle of large Martian mammals,
armor against thick body plate? No... it's wind...
an amethyst sky, a blinding pewter-blue sun
at horizon... broiled. This is palpable dust-to-dust.
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Wrapped in elk grease and thick felt,
thinking grows tactile...
as your fingers comb your history...
as your neocortex loses its metaphysics.
As for the coyote...
the coyote is a generation ahead of itself...
engaged in watching a city street...
a captive and companion.
You and the coyote exchange
specially designed keys made with bison hump.
You ride around in an ambulance
until it is time to jet-away.
Wrapped in elk grease and thick felt,
you learn to walk and to sing...
to chew cyclone fence and warble...
man to moon... coyote to dead hare.
Coyote and Joseph Beuys
Saturday, May 9, 2015
Stay or Go
Keota, Colorado, Dust Bowl
by Arthur Rothstein (courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)
Stay or Go
Along with a sand-wind to grit dishes,
a squabble of hawks in a sad claimants
titanium-blue sky.
Not-right-now marionberry
cafe pie... dead flies
in the dust of a display case.
The looted aquifers....
No one knows anymore...
not for sure.
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Soren Kierkegaard
Soren Kierkegaard
A serene elderly couple,
bodies compacted, whittled narrow
by wind through December aspen trees,
rides a rusty-chain swing set.
Against a windowless wall
of an abandoned factory,
a film is projected... a firing squad.
The cobbled ground glitters
with sunlight off colored
bits of bottle glass.
Monday, May 4, 2015
PLOUGHSHARES Includes a Ciara Shuttleworth Poem
The current issue of Ploughshares (Spring 2015), a "Transatlantic Poetry Issue" edited by Neil Astley, includes Ciara Shuttleworth's "Limerence."
Among the other poets presented in this issue of Ploughshares: Sean Borodale, Marianne Boruch, Louis de Paor, Stephen Dobyns, Elaine Feinstein, Nick Flynn, Vona Groarke, Barbara Hamby, Rita Ann Higgins, Tony Hoagland, John Hodgen, Michael Hofmann, Andrew Hudgins, Major Jackson, Michael Klein, Dorianne Laux, Luljeta Lleshanaku, Michael Longley, Thomas Lux, Aonghas MacNeacail, Medbh McGuckian, Paula Meehan, Sinead Morrissey, Paul Muldoon, Caitriona O'Reilly, Frank Ormsby, Roger Reeves, Michael Ryan, Austin Smith, Anne Stevenson, Amy Woolard, and Matthew Zapruder.
Ciara Shuttleworth has published poetry in Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, The New Yorker, The Norton Introduction to Literature (11e), and The Southern Review. She was a 2014 Jerome Foundation Fellow at the Anderson Center at Tower View. She is currently in residence at Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida.
Ploughshares is a distinguished literary journal published at Emerson College in Boston. The journal is guest edited serially by significant writers.
Saturday, May 2, 2015
SOLITUDES: A Red Shuttleworth Poetry Chapbook
Solitudes
a scatter-shot poem
Red Shuttleworth
The final version of Red Shuttleworth's Solitudes, a moving-parts poem which has been presented in-progress on the blog, is now a (limited edition) Bunchgrass Press chapbook.
A Blood Moon... April 2015
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