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| Joan Houlihan |
The Hastings Room Reading Series Welcomes Joan Houlihan on May the 9th, 2018,
this coming Wednesday,
7pm at
Christ Church ,O Garden Street--just outside of Harvard Square...
Our
spring reader this year is Joan Houlihan. Joan’s previously released poetry,
two narrative sequences, were forged in the deep past, out of the bubble of
present times, in pre-historic hunter-gatherer days. The second book of the
sequence, Ay, was published early in 2014. A motivation for the
narrative’s setting in long-forgotten times stems from Houlihan’s concern for
permanent human nature. Its central tragedy identifies with the story of Cain
and Abel, and though of such a primitive region of our psyche, to this day it
continues to be a major source of parental woe and daily news, not to mention
Congressional gridlock.
Along
with The Us and Ay, Joan Houlihan is the author of The Mending
Worm, winner of the 2005 Green Rose Prize in poetry, and Handheld
Executions, poems and essays 2006. She founded the Concord Poetry Center,
and is the founder and director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conferences.
Joan serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency
MFA
program.
The
Us
was named a 2009 must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
As
a Freshman in college, I learned in an Introduction to American Literature
course that one distinctive characteristic of our stories and poetry is
“primitivism.” I only remembered that label recently as I pondered the unique
language that Houlihan smithied for her narrative book-length poems, and which
is carried forth in her new book, Shadow-feast,
released by Four Way Books. Houlihan’s language is unusual in its conscious
preference away from Latinate or Scholarly English—mirroring the prehistoric or
a-temporal subject of those first two
books. Oddly she achieves this American primitivism through language by
harkening back to a use of English in poetry before America was even founded,
in the alliterative diction of Old English poetry where the formal omission of
articles (“a” and “the”) draws weight and blood back into nouns. It is a
language keen in elemental
perception of basic phenomena, seasons, plants, animals and birds, night and
day, sea and land, stripped almost entirely of concept and abstraction. We see
these signatures in the new book, Shadow-feast:
p.
3: SLEPT OUT to sea and sailing in a wave
uncertain what was in the hold then comes from years: a comb…
p.
6: She sat him up to sip /
a bowl of broth
p.14:
pulley-roped palliatives
p.
31 Lean me on you, I am rid of wish
p.
32 I am mute, but thought-loud.
I
have recently noted in an article that the new book is presented in three
dramatic parts, two monologues, Hers,
His, and a sort of post script, Theirs. It’s a work of expressions from
imagination—biographically referential howsoever. This organization and
representation lend remove to the poems, allow us to read them as we might view
or read a play. It also sets the book in perspective as literary genre, with
Rilke’s wonderful poem on assisting the dying “Washing the Corpse,” or
Faulkner’s streaming dramatic novel As I Lay Dying.
It
is interesting to note that the Personae of Shadow-feast
are possessive pronouns: Hers, His, Theirs.
This links Shadow-feast with
Houlihan’s two previous book-length poems, Ay
(“I”) and The Us, with their
titles evocative of nominal pronouns.
As
is the case with every Hastings Room reading, this coming Wednesday’s will be
the best one yet. Come join us.
The
Hastings Room Reading series was founded in 2014 by Steven Brown and Michael
Steffen.
It
holds place thanks to the space allowed to us by First Church Congregationalist
and is free, accepting donations which go to the church. We want to acknowledge
the generosity of help, over these past four years, given by Irene Koronos, Dan
Wuenschel, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, Kevin Cutrer, and many others, including our
readers.
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