Hi from Tally

Hi Everybody!

I echo the enthusiasm in the previous posts. I’m looking forward, too, to the opportunity at ACA for my first ever residency. And I’m looking forward especially to working with everyone on the projects that matter most to us right now.

I currently live in Tallahassee, where I’m in my third year of PhD studies. I’m originally from Western Massachusetts though. Next month my first book of poems, ABOUT CROWS, comes out with the University of Wisconsin Press. I’m really excited about it, but I’m more excited about the poems I’m working on right now and what I hope will grow into a second manuscript.

I’d like to use the time at ACA to write a few new drafts, engage in some radical revisions, and hopefully make some unexpected creative discoveries.

Lately I’ve been working on these “sonnets” that incorporate found language; I call them JALOPY SONNETS and I have about twenty of them. I’ll close by sharing one.

Take care,

Craig

Sonnet (with language found etched into the corner of a train window)

A hawk circles above the tobacco barn as

off-duty firefighters help assemble a
merry-go-round. Hungover and smelling of
wood smoke on New Year’s morning. PPC-25C AS

-4 superimposed over a maize maze

farmers have flattened into the face of Darwin.
I still don’t know how to treat anyone in
my life. When I close my eyes I see high school exes

with Electriplex® and FRA TYPE I TIER II

tattooed on their lower backs. Every part ordered,
“bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners,
that we may see and remark, and say Whose?”

Like the desks at which middle-schoolers sit to write,

chromed, and bent from the frames of Columbia bikes.