Christmas in November: Giscombe & Thompson at the Desert City

Please spread far and wide......

Who: C. S. Giscombe, author of Here, Giscome Road, and Into and Out of Dislocation, Fullbright Scholar, Pushcart Prize Winner, my friend and fellow member of the Pennsylvania 12.

Who: Jon Thompson, author of the just published The Book of the Floating World, editor of Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, NC State Professor, mentor to many people who open doors with their left hands.

What: Desert City November reading, sending out 20-04 with a TKOh, baby.

When: This Saturday, November 13th, 8pm, 2004.

Where: Internationalist Books, 405 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 919-942-1740.

Why: "Love's inarticulate when it does appear: it's just lazy speech -- love talk -- and not specific and you can't exchange it for much." "we know so little but on that / we base everything"

See you there....

*Internationalist Books: http://www.internationalistbooks.org

*Desert City Poetry Series: http://desertcity.blogspot.com

C. S. Giscombe: http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/backlist/giscombe.html

Jon Thompson: http://www.parlorpress.com/thompson.html

http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/

Contact the DCPS: Ken Rumble: rumblek at bellsouth dot net

Next Month: January 15th, Saturday, 8pm: Standard Schaeffer & Marcos Canteli w/ Rachel Price

Jon Thompson

"Writing History"

If everything becomes everything else

if every event touches every other event

creates it reverberates through and beyond it

then nothing is inconsequential and history

is both what we are and what we are becoming

a continuous making and unmaking a story of unspeakable

intimacy and unspeakable loss here is a photograph

of winter and dusk and train tracks

and a grimy factory woman who is trying to make her way home

someone who has passed out of one history

into another where the blanks are unfillable

we know so little but on that

we base everything

& the photographer who is about to take her photograph

he does not know her

does not know her reason his own this man who became

the photograph I now hold in my hand how

the blanks & spaces fill the years

how much the body the tired body

the photographed body the figurative body

depends upon them

the spaces that loom larger longer wider

what was it you saw when you glanced up at him

that man who lived in a world which still thought

the world was all in the things you could see

C. S. Giscombe

from Giscome Road

The song's a commotion rising in the current, almost an apparition: or the shape

rises -- obvious, river-like -- in the blood (in the house that the blood made)

& goes on, is the fact of hte "oldest ancestor," in who

name etc description itself persists on out, not like some story into the uplands, on into the stony breakdown, no line

between the old river god & the old man's name coming up along the river & on the road:

an endless invisible present going on, a noise

(with nothing at the other side of it)

. . .

Having wanted to drive out to the edge, right out

to the mutest edge out there,

the mutest edge, the emptiest soundstage,

out to the invisibility there, out

to all that "up" there in Canada that took place up there --

Giscome, B. C. all unincorporated now up

on the Upper Fraser Rd off desolate Rte 16 to Alberta,

off the Alberta-bound road the Yellowhead (for Pierre B---, the blonde Iroquois who'd arrived

at the mountains there at the Alberta end, the source of the road): miscegenation's

the longest nuance, the longest-lasting open secret

(in old B.C., Gov. Douglas was also "a man of colour," "a West Indian

of racially mixed parentage" out at the end of a pier in Victoria, welcoming

"creole," pragmatic

. . .

[Northern Road]

The arrival at the edge of water

some little end of the water come to & breached

(in a stretch forward or as though in a gesture

from, typically, one of so many edges),

a hiatus in the travel by water, the build

of negatives & switchbacks along the same old bank

the edge of a story

the story's same old edge through the new twists, almost

intestinal from all maps of it, knotted --

the edge in the voice, the little edge creeping,

a fast little edge that could have crept into the voices & stayed there

unrelieved 'til the edge was come to of the water itself

(the endless description)

the endlessness of the story breached

at the foot finally

at the root of the trees