Story
I say I don’t want to tell my story but it’s all I want to talk about. The husbands, lovers, one-night-stands, the sweet weekend-artists, I have to rehash them, have to describe that room in Antwerp that looked out on the Zoo—red walls and an hourly rate, across the place from where the railway entrance was guarded by gargoyles. Or were they Angels?
Were we drunk? Why did we take that room?
There wasn’t a full night before the train left for London, too late then to want each other, sex a duel we fought again and again, beautiful and brutal, both of us too mean and scared to complain.
Alone, I’d rock and cry and hold my knees close to my chest, whirling against an impossible terror. I wanted my awful mother then, or even the hospital nuns who pulled my hair until I squealed, instead of trains then planes then his awful hands.
Mini-interview with Wendy Taylor Carlisle
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
WTC: In 1981, my son nearly died in a bicycle accident, I’ve been in a hurry to write ever since, but no poet becomes a poet without the influence of other, better poets and everybody I ever studied with from Miller Williams to Naomi Shihab Nye helped, but Jack Myers, my first teacher at Vermont, gave me a seat at the table. I owe him.
HFR: What are you reading?
WTC: Ed Hirsch’s The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, and because of that, Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song, Ralph Angel translation, and Selected Verse, edited by Christopher Maurer and translated by lots of folks to greater or lesser effect. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Selected Poetry, Stephen Mitchell translation, and also Rilke’s Uncollected Poems, Edward Snow translation.
The Ministry for the Future, eco-sci-fi from Kim Stanley Robinson.
Always Laura Kasischke. Where Now: New and Selected.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Story”?
WTC: I prefer to let poems speak for themselves.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
WTC: A book manuscript with no exact name—maybe Portal to the Strange.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
WTC: Politically I’m left. That’s what I’m fanatical about. As for the “anything,” I live in the country, on a rocky patch of Ozark land. It’s very quiet here except for the tree frogs and peepers. Before that, I lived elsewhere. Elsewhere did not suit me. I mean to root here on this land and later be buried with the dogs in their graveyard behind the shop. Five of them are already there, waiting.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and six chapbooks. Her work has appeared in pacificREVIEW, Atlanta Review, Tab, Rattle, and others. More information is at her website wendytaylorcarlisle.com.
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Heavy Feather Review 