Tag: marika von zellen

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dawn Lonsinger’s “Whelm”

dawnlonsinger

Slow Saunter of Wither

A cow’s ears can turn in any direction, and the field
is full of those flickering radar, small curtains

of flesh. We are an acoustic location, a passing thing.
Our car gulps in the grass air, is pulled by an under-

current. Dependence like a taste, the dark drawbridge
of night folding form down into nestle, wind rattling

the hollow half-note of mailboxes. The chest
floor opens upon the earth, slow saunter of wither

and hook bone, verb between sun and graze, sun and
subsequently. No moo. No matter. Who or what was

the first to look toward the teat of another animal and feel
thirsty? Did they also feel suspended? Sleepy? Cosseted?

Guilt or indignity for the theft? I am, even now, startled
by their calmness, heart girth purring like a small fan.

Milk teetering in warm pockets, and us nearby–
continuous intravenous drip. Dream of clotted cream,

sinewy lullaby. Water to wine–that’s showmanship. Water
to milk–that’s love and peril. A marriage that should raise

a cathedral up around their pin bones, sacred the space
so to take is to need: dire roast. But instead we

forklift the living into the living, harvest what we can.
News reports recall meat is piling up in school districts.

Freezers. Hangs from our bodies. When the cows lie down
in unison, we better run for cover. I try, but my feet are full

of meat, heavy against the moving vehicle on the moving earth,
milky clouds amassing above us like a scavenging.

—

This selection comes from Dawn Lonsinger’s book Whelm, available from Lost Horse Press. Purchase your copy here!

In addition to Whelm, Dawn Lonsinger is the author of two chapbooks: the linoleum crop (Jeanne Duval Editions; chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the 2007 Terminus Magazine Chapbook Contest), and The Nested Object (Dancing Girl Press). You can see the books and other things on her website:  www.dawnlonsinger.com. Her poems have recently appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, Subtropics, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Third Coast, Poetry East, and elsewhere.  Lyric essays are out in recent issues of Black Warrior Review and Western Humanities Review.  Dawn is the recipient of the Corson Bishop Prize, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize, a Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. More recently she won the Scowcroft Prize (chosen by Lidia Yuknavitch), an Academy of American Poets Prize (chosen by Heather McHugh), three Utah Arts Council Writing Awards, the Utah Writers’ Contest in prose (chosen by Susan Steinberg) and poetry (chosen by Wayne Koestenbaum), runner up for the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award (chosen by H.L. Hix), runner up for The Bat City Review Art & Writing Collaboration Prize (chosen by Tomaž Šalamun), and was awarded four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. She was also selected by Claudia Emerson for Best New Poets 2010. Dawn did her undergraduate studies at Bucknell University, majoring in English and photography.

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dawn Lonsinger’s “Whelm”

whelm

Incidental Love Poem

I step in the water sloughed off your body onto the bathroom floor.
I sleep in your stains, wake in your border, eat your leftovers, sweep
up your dead skin cells. Your sauces sit in my refrigerator like organs
in their transparent, breakable containers. When you are here I hear
you cough, stroke your skin as if to keep it taut. We swap colorless,
odorless gases and saliva. Our eyes bob in our magnetic faces. When
you are elsewhere, I curl like an old photograph trying to raise its dead.
I swim in three lakes simultaneously. I part my hair down the middle
of my head through the mirror where you untie your face, the sutures
undetectable. I think of your body as a plank and a screen, of your soul
as a cloud of grasshoppers. My tongue absorbs the salt in your skin,
swallows oceans, the giant gyratory seagulls scanning my face, the sun
holding my tender pink core together as you do. I finger through your
pages, listen to the symbols grind their teeth. Your things congregate in
small heaps. They take on significance, crystallize, and I am deep into
the damp cavern of idolatry. I put on your shirt, spread peanut butter
on toast. In my dreams I fondle your blue glacier, pull hummingbirds
from your chest, feel quenched. I admire how your mouth never looks
like a dam blasted with carp, how it evaporates in the skeletal light
of the hallway. Our gravity is horizontal, palpable as heavy whipping
cream. I decorate absence. I pull one of your hairs from my mouth.

—

This selection comes from Dawn Lonsinger’s book Whelm, available from Lost Horse Press. Purchase your copy here!

In addition to Whelm, Dawn Lonsinger is the author of two chapbooks: the linoleum crop (Jeanne Duval Editions; chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the 2007 Terminus Magazine Chapbook Contest), and The Nested Object (Dancing Girl Press). You can see the books and other things on her website:  www.dawnlonsinger.com. Her poems have recently appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, Subtropics, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Third Coast, Poetry East, and elsewhere.  Lyric essays are out in recent issues of Black Warrior Review and Western Humanities Review.  Dawn is the recipient of the Corson Bishop Prize, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize, a Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. More recently she won the Scowcroft Prize (chosen by Lidia Yuknavitch), an Academy of American Poets Prize (chosen by Heather McHugh), three Utah Arts Council Writing Awards, the Utah Writers’ Contest in prose (chosen by Susan Steinberg) and poetry (chosen by Wayne Koestenbaum), runner up for the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award (chosen by H.L. Hix), runner up for The Bat City Review Art & Writing Collaboration Prize (chosen by Tomaž Šalamun), and was awarded four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. She was also selected by Claudia Emerson for Best New Poets 2010. Dawn did her undergraduate studies at Bucknell University, majoring in English and photography.

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dawn Lonsinger’s “Whelm”

dawnlonsinger

[Ruin Is a Thing That Happens in The Past]

rain spreads like a negligee over everything–

My longing is a forest, and your voice is all the birds
that live there, are hushed in the rain. Let me learn
the candor of falling, the open-endedness of roofs,
how to knot my fingers with earth and let go, how
to put down the unending letter. When I look out into
the porcelain night, see all the fissures widening–
beauty shattering in deep magenta alleyways, I long
for the moxy of the torrential. The old men in doorways
speak in a language we cannot know
of how to slice evenly down the belly of a fish.

The children keep darting out into the lightning,
tempting the gods to tackle them. The rain is making
a case–that baptism, that flush. That the stars will
never belly up. That luster is, of course, an antidote
to our eyes, and we are no more purgatorial than
the pools underneath it all, catching the seemingly endless
runoff, dirty as all get out. When it stops we go outside,
electrified with silvery dampness, and stare down into
the puddles. We see only the sanity of suggestion,
the torn sleeve of time, evidence that we are not
yet ghosts–all echo and ripple and swig.

—

This selection comes from Dawn Lonsinger’s book Whelm, available from Lost Horse Press. Purchase your copy here!

In addition to Whelm, Dawn Lonsinger is the author of two chapbooks: the linoleum crop (Jeanne Duval Editions; chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the 2007 Terminus Magazine Chapbook Contest), and The Nested Object (Dancing Girl Press). You can see the books and other things on her website:  www.dawnlonsinger.com. Her poems have recently appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, Subtropics, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Third Coast, Poetry East, and elsewhere.  Lyric essays are out in recent issues of Black Warrior Review and Western Humanities Review.  Dawn is the recipient of the Corson Bishop Prize, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize, a Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. More recently she won the Scowcroft Prize (chosen by Lidia Yuknavitch), an Academy of American Poets Prize (chosen by Heather McHugh), three Utah Arts Council Writing Awards, the Utah Writers’ Contest in prose (chosen by Susan Steinberg) and poetry (chosen by Wayne Koestenbaum), runner up for the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award (chosen by H.L. Hix), runner up for The Bat City Review Art & Writing Collaboration Prize (chosen by Tomaž Šalamun), and was awarded four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. She was also selected by Claudia Emerson for Best New Poets 2010. Dawn did her undergraduate studies at Bucknell University, majoring in English and photography.

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dawn Lonsinger’s “Whelm”

whelm

La Fille Fragile

Her silver waist went out to sea
like petal debris, rain-tattered ma chère parfois

and my feet lessened into shore
so not even the biggest mirror could reach me

Now the sky sparks with remembering
her eyes afloat in the darkness

mon autre moi, my sad little nuptial glance

Who will risk more extremely the south of my sorrows?
Admittedly you sleep whereas your smile–

Nous avons dormi dans les beaux bâtiments
light is remorse and and what fades repairs her

Clearly, you very little till now not to be phase of phase
and the mascara is sad. She wilts the way I clutch purple
elderberries in my shirt

F’espère coïncider

How to risk more extremely la nuit? A small bridal fall?
How to make wither the quiet black city she left?

You play the door. I will play cumulus. La musique fait.
The song of lamp flowers festoons foreheads as they pass.
Probably rightly you the ailing repair, you the light of regret

Ne pas Ne pas ma chère parfois

If the peaches fall and disappear
where the peonies parcel out the moon
and our fingers scatter like lightning
bugs, des serviettes oranges pour l’occasion

Elsewhere magic acquits us

Obviously il y avait beaucoup d’oiseaux,
obviously we sleep underneath amplifying

departure

—

This selection comes from Dawn Lonsinger’s book Whelm, available from Lost Horse Press. Purchase your copy here!

In addition to Whelm, Dawn Lonsinger is the author of two chapbooks: the linoleum crop (Jeanne Duval Editions; chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the 2007 Terminus Magazine Chapbook Contest), and The Nested Object (Dancing Girl Press). You can see the books and other things on her website:  www.dawnlonsinger.com. Her poems have recently appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, Subtropics, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Third Coast, Poetry East, and elsewhere.  Lyric essays are out in recent issues of Black Warrior Review and Western Humanities Review.  Dawn is the recipient of the Corson Bishop Prize, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize, a Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. More recently she won the Scowcroft Prize (chosen by Lidia Yuknavitch), an Academy of American Poets Prize (chosen by Heather McHugh), three Utah Arts Council Writing Awards, the Utah Writers’ Contest in prose (chosen by Susan Steinberg) and poetry (chosen by Wayne Koestenbaum), runner up for the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award (chosen by H.L. Hix), runner up for The Bat City Review Art & Writing Collaboration Prize (chosen by Tomaž Šalamun), and was awarded four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. She was also selected by Claudia Emerson for Best New Poets 2010. Dawn did her undergraduate studies at Bucknell University, majoring in English and photography.

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dawn Lonsinger’s “Whelm”

dawnlonsinger

Holding

At night something blue
brushes over the laundry.

Our house holds our dishes and
necks away from the come-hither
chroma of stars.

The lamp flounces a little
skirt of light onto the dresser.

You are naked, kneeling
by the bath, your palm
under the water as if to
stop it.

Our house holds many mirrors.
Our house holds drawers
of thumbtacks and ink.

The moon is not a marrying
but in it everything a chamber,
remedial–

Our house is saturated
with carpet. I hear the hum of a sky
that scissors elsewhere. Sea
sound of unfastening.

Our house holds portraits snug
against its chest.

I am pulling out
bobby pins. It is an era
of subtraction.

From outside looking in, our house
is a gash between curtains.
But you are warm,
lifted, cupped, the water

hugging you in half.

—

This selection comes from Dawn Lonsinger’s book Whelm, available from Lost Horse Press. Purchase your copy here!

In addition to Whelm, Dawn Lonsinger is the author of two chapbooks: the linoleum crop (Jeanne Duval Editions; chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the 2007 Terminus Magazine Chapbook Contest), and The Nested Object (Dancing Girl Press). You can see the books and other things on her website:  www.dawnlonsinger.com. Her poems have recently appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, Subtropics, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Third Coast, Poetry East, and elsewhere.  Lyric essays are out in recent issues of Black Warrior Review and Western Humanities Review.  Dawn is the recipient of the Corson Bishop Prize, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize, a Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. More recently she won the Scowcroft Prize (chosen by Lidia Yuknavitch), an Academy of American Poets Prize (chosen by Heather McHugh), three Utah Arts Council Writing Awards, the Utah Writers’ Contest in prose (chosen by Susan Steinberg) and poetry (chosen by Wayne Koestenbaum), runner up for the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award (chosen by H.L. Hix), runner up for The Bat City Review Art & Writing Collaboration Prize (chosen by Tomaž Šalamun), and was awarded four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. She was also selected by Claudia Emerson for Best New Poets 2010. Dawn did her undergraduate studies at Bucknell University, majoring in English and photography.

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

Nature Writing: It’s Kind of Important

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As the name suggests, Nature Writing is usually nonfiction prose about, you guessed it, nature. Mostly based on the facts about the workings of plants and animals, Nature Writing can provide an interesting new look at not only scenery description and understanding in prose, but in all kinds of writing. I don’t know about you, but when I try to paint a scene in a novel by explaining how the pine needles smell in the forest, or how this-and-that flower blooms only at night, I really have no clue what I’m talking about. I might as well be describing the mechanics behind a particle accelerator: And there was a big whoosh, and the whoosh smelled like chemicals, and looked like lasers, and the atoms somehow sped up. Yeah. Not that brilliant.

In its most distinct form, Nature Writing creates characters out of non-human subjects such as the landscape itself, the animals that roam over the landscape, or even just the atmospheric changes we see every day in the sky. A mountain becomes an old man with a permanent stoop and a gravelly voice. A snail becomes an explorer, moving deliberately over each leaf and stone, as seen in Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens. While there are human characters in Nature Writing, the purpose is to give a knowledgeable, often scientific focus to the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants. Knowing the types of flowers and trees present in Kew Gardens—knowing how to make them come alive—must have taken Virginia Woolf some thought, and perhaps some study. Her vivid, colorful close-up of garden life could have been a boring lecture about watching the grass grow or petals wilt in the sunlight. She gave the plants their own narratives, something most of us probably can’t pull-off.

Giving intelligence to matter is another type of expression in Nature Writing. For example, “fog drifted over the open moors as if it wished to bring the sea closer onto land,” gives the fog an intelligence that fog probably doesn’t have. The fog doesn’t know what it’s doing, but in this sentence it becomes a character with an ambition and purpose. Nature and matter are not only acted upon, but can act upon their own desires, which brings in a whole new set of potential points of view. Richard Mabey writes in his article for The Guardian, “It’s a recognition of the appropriate, and therefore intelligent, behavior of matter, and that landscapes have ‘memories’ embedded in their structure that influence their present environs, their future destinies—and the humans that pass through them.”

As humans, we seem to give life and voice to inanimate objects pretty easily (i.e. any story or movie involving a haunted house and talking objects). But when it comes to understanding nature on a deeper level, we become a bit stumped. What, a peanut is a legume, not a nut?! There are even arguments as to whether it makes sense to constrict the mysteries of nature in our limited human language, however creatively we might try. Is it better to just say, “There was a bird in the nest and it called out over the fields as I walked toward the tool shed” without trying to understand the bird’s song, why it sings, what it’s pitches mean, and what the bird is feeling? Is it too over-our-heads to latch a human-level of comprehension to the complexities of our natural surroundings?

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One of Kew Gardens’ many exotic flowers.

In my opinion, if we didn’t try to understand nature and attempt to bring it closer to us (some would call this anthropomorphism) we would be missing so much of our current repertoire of literary classics: Walden by Henry David Thoreau, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemmingway, After the Quake by Haruki Murakami, as well as hundreds of others. Charles Darwin was a staunch Nature Writer. If he hadn’t given such focus to animals and plants, would we have the theory of evolution? Nature Writing requires not only a philosophical and imaginative understanding of flora, fauna, and matter, but a scientific understanding as well.

As a writer, there have been times when my lack of knowledge (and lack of imagination) about different natural materials totally ruined my confidence in a specific scene. I suggest, as a challenge to yourself, to read up on Nature Writing and begin incorporating its elements into your writing. When you can bring everything to life in your work—houseflies and tumbleweeds non-exempt—why wouldn’t you?

 

Marika Von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. In the summer of 2012, she attended Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys playing piano, theoretical physics, traveling, ghost-hunting, the Cuban Revolution, climbing trees, 3rd Wave Feminism, and good Czech beer. She’s also a [wannabe] scholar of Lewis Carroll.

Project Bookshelf–Marika von Zellen

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Hello, everyone! This is my contribution to Project Bookshelf. Unfortunately, my collection only spans two shelves, because my actual library is being stored back in the U.S. with the rest of my buried treasure.

As you can see, I have groups of books about a specific subject or person. This is due to my infallible ability to obsess over random historical figures and subject matter. Exhibit A: The Letters of Lewis Carroll. Since reading Alice in Wonderland many years ago, I haven’t been able to cease my frenetic research of Lewis Carroll, the author, who was also a Mathematics professor and a deacon at Oxford University. To clarify, I tend to like things shrouded in mystery. Or things that offer many opposing explanations or theories. There are six books about Lewis Carroll’s life on these two shelves (told ya I obsess).

Exhibit B: Che and the Cuban Revolution. You can’t get much further from Victorian England than that. Che came into my life when I was feeling very disoriented and in need of a cause (AKA, I’d just graduated from college). It’s easy to classify “Che” as a teenage rebel’s sexy martyr, but there’s much more to his story. Was he a hero who fought for the rights of the common people, or was he a murderous rouge who helped strangle Cuba’s freedom of expression? We may never know… so I guess I’ll read more books about him.

Exhibit C: Czech language learning books. They speak for themselves. Literally. They speak really, really fast, and in Czech, so that’s why they’re sitting on my shelf and gathering dust.

As for the rest, you can see on the bottom shelf a few books by Brian Greene, a young theoretical physicist. Understanding the Universe and basic physics (especially String Theory or M-Theory, which both produce a universe with over 10 dimensions) is what I like to do for fun. Knowledge is power! I also wanted to be an astronaut, so this is about as close as I can get to space travel (where’s a Tardis when you need one, eh?). You’ll also find some classics such as Chekhov’s short stories, Agatha Christie’s Murder-of-some-kind-in-the-library-or-hotel-or-garden-or-someplace-public, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and good old Silas Marner  (he’s definitely Tardis-companion worthy). Tossed into the mix is some popular lit like Flynn’s spectacular Gone Girl, Collin’s Mockingjay, and Tartt’s The Goldfinch.

To conclude: read what you want, when you want. Read copiously. Read all subjects, and all genres, because you never know what might spark a creative obsession.

Marika Von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field,Temporary Infinity, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. In the summer of 2012, she attended Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys playing piano, theoretical physics, traveling, ghost-hunting, the Cuban Revolution, climbing trees, 3rd Wave Feminism, and good Czech beer. She’s also a [wannabe] scholar of Lewis Carroll.