But the idea of transformation has always been something that I romanticize in a work. I’m cautious of it but I also need it to connect my thoughts with the process of making. That’s really important.
Nari Ward
A Species is an Idea
This vine is just a vine
a substitute for nothing:
little mitten
bellwether friend
Or you, my landscape
a sensory derangement
next to Ireland’s forgeries
The dream of her gigantic ear
on the poem’s longest coastline
The poem that is America
America a prophecy
like reason in atomic winter
We think its magic wheel
is but a dress
that calls this city home
Unpeopled, architectural
Yesness Park
A horse or a turnip
Your Wealth is on the stove
by the National Institutes of
the earth at night
As for Baudelaire
a picture of half your face
is all the world, like a new democracy
by Henry Adams
To thumb the wave
to get awakened
My verse, my vernissage
sinking to the hand
as green against the snow
or a pretty paragraph
foreshortened in pink
going through the season
from apples to oranges
a task I will accomplish
with all the dirt I came from
What did I expect
to break into the sun?
So begins our legislation
You’ve Lost Your Card
Or it lost you before it hit the floor
Not everyone’s thinking about how to dress
for evolution, it’s not even our show
who barely speak as a species
Edges dissolve like a parade
with Florida looking like a gun
and Texas like a gun
And Oklahoma like a flag that pops out of a gun
on an episode of F Troop in my Oklahoma phase
before I knew what a military transport plane sounds like
touching down, its wheels bounce back with a little cry
or so they did before my brother was called up
That was another war
before we knew what we know
And before we forgot what we knew:
the appearance of another flag
the appearance of a continent with handles
as if it could be lifted by a rhetorical gesture
above the big round heat of the rest of our lives
Elizabeth Willis’s new collection of poems is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2011. Other works include Meteoric Flowers (2006), Turneresque (2003), The Human Abstract (1995), Second Law (1993), and the Belladonna chapbook All the Paintings of Giorgione (2006). She teaches at Wesleyan University.
This issue of First Proof is sponsored in part by the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Dan Asher, Elizabeth Streb and A.M Homes, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Alain Mabanckou, Jennifer Egan, Edward Droste, Cynthia Hopkins, and Joan Jonas.
But the idea of transformation has always been something that I romanticize in a work. I’m cautious of it but I also need it to connect my thoughts with the process of making. That’s really important.
Nari Ward