Two
poems from Lisa Williams's Hollow
followed
by a note on the author
The
Iceberg
The
iceberg moves will-less
through shades of gray and gray,
a tower of clouded glass
seeming proud ofisolation, rising
in air. Or the iceberg's top lies
flat along the water, its misshapen
turrets jutting below the surface
like an upside down, gothic cathedral
made of ice.
Around the tower and its moat
or the inverted iceberg, or tipped cathedral
dipped in the green-black liquid and remote
in mists (if you could stand in the middle
of it all) is the smell of ice and brine,
rough sea in the purist wind
that blows from far-off coasts
and stays here, freshening.
You would taste a tinge of time
on your tongue, its encrystalled distances
jagged in the strong dark absence of lament –
that chunk of knowledge always
inaccessible
but always defended by the physical
world, without judgement or pretense,
simply floating.
On
Not Using the Word "Cunt" in a Poem
Certainly
there's pressure to perform
in such a way what doesn't sound so stately
and isn't safe: Let it be shorn,
the poem's lush holiness. Let locks be trimmed.
Cut to the chase. How unchaste can you be?
Can I proffer a different kind of tongue,
one that licks nether regions? Can I start
offering words that aren't courtly or cute
and don't contain such blanket recanting,
of words I use when I am in a wreck
or made at somebody or being fucked
– those anti-canticles I chant when hurt,
the kind of words I punt when breaking glass
or bumping ceilings? Can I be curt,
not hunt for language so gosh-darned appealing
but pick what's more intransigent
and less ornate? Or is that just a judgment
ignorance can make – that stealing
the spotlight, showing one can "rough it up"
is really more mere decorativeness,
like the performance of a burlesque romp
by someone who would rather keep her dress?
Is that all poems can do to snatch attention,
use such dim tents of tricks? Let's nick
this baby in the bud: am I too mendicant
to fluid cadence? Do I serve lip
by thinking a poem is holy, not a hole
to thrust things in, for the very sake of thrusting?
Or do I suit myself for an audience
by shirking my naked voice, or the cliche
of what a woman's naked utterance
would be, as if just honest women cussed?
Should I be someone who docks elegance
because it's penal territory,
someone who takes the name of poetry
in vain – who kicks the ass of beauty?
I know we're all voyeurs, but can't
you come for me a different way this time
and listen, for one minute, to a poem
that's not revealing crotch and pay attention?
Is it impossible for me to strut
my stuff without the madonna/whore
dichotomy? Without the flash of tit-
illation, would you give my poem a date?
Or must I count my kind of cunning out?
©
Lisa Williams was born in Nashville, Tennessee
in 1966, and was educated at Belmont University, the University
of Cincinnati and the University of Virginia, where she obtained
her BA, MA and MFA, respectively. She is currently Assistant
Professor of English at Centre College. Lisa has one previous
collection of poems, The Hammered Dulcimer (Utah State
University Press, 1998), which was selected by John Hollander
for the May Swanson Poetry Award, and her poems have appeared
or are forthcoming in a wide variety of journals, amongst them
Southern Review, Raritan, Southwest Review,
Literary Imagination, The New Republic, Bat
City Review, Quadrant (Australia), Virginia Quarterly
Review, Poetry, Image, and New England
Review. Apart from the May Swenson Award mentioned above,
Lisa's honours include the Rome Prize in Literature awarded
by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2004-2005), a recent
nomination for a Pushcart Prize by editors of Southwest Review,
Southwest Review's Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award (for
best poem published in its pages) (2002), a Walter E. Dakin
Fellowship (1998) a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the
Sewanee Writers' Conference (1997), a Henry Hoynes Poetry Fellowship,
from the University of Virginia and an Elliston Poetry Fellowship
from the University of Cincinnati.
"The
Iceberg" first appeared in Southwest Review (winning
the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award as the best poem published
in that magazine in 2002), and "On Not Using the Word 'Cunt'
in a Poem" first appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review.
