limitless tiny boat by ruth danon book preview
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By investigating the minutiae of life—the stuff that anchors us, a stone and its echo, paradoxes constructed by language—Ruth Danon investigates nothing short of Thanatos and Eros. The journey of the Limitless, Tiny Boat is fierce and fearless. Watch out! These poems expand and contract—breathe—as they are read. A substantial achievement. —Martine BellenRuth Danon seems to gather all of life into her Limitless, Tiny Boat—or to explore every corner, every inch of the limitless, tiny boat that is life. In these flawlessly sculpted, deeply considered and compelling poems, Danon probes the machinery of life—how it sputters, hums along, gets stuck, stops, then restarts, hums along again. She shows how we must reckon with the terrors and consolations of the physical world, make an existential tally, and move on. “Words are / the only boat I have,” she writes. And then, “Really the trick is to estimate / from here, the journey outward.” This book is a beautiful reckoning, an astute tallying, and a profound journey through the dark and bright corridors that make up a life.—Laura SimsI’ve been reading Ruth Danon’s poetry for many years, always with pleasure. She is one of the most honest and affecting poets on the current scene, a writer more than willing to take deep emotional risks, bringing the reader close the flame. She says she is "lucky knowing / that everything tends / to a particular moment” in her latest collection. I suspect that much of her work as a poet has tended toward the moments gathered in Limitless, Tiny Boat. It’s important work, and Danon takes us far beyond the fringes of thought and feeling.—Jay PariniLike any passageway between the profane and the sacred, Ruth Danon's poems keep looking for home: "Words are the only boat I have," she writes in her second collection, Limitless, Tiny Boat. Danon's voice is intimate, wary, disarming, alive with intelligence and "the extreme urgency of patience." Though she claims that "three lines suggests a narrative," she also admits that "Narrative eludes me...." The material facts of a body in pain, in danger, in love find expression in the book's central sequence, a meditation that swerves from a "small cooking pot" to peristalsis: "The rose opens and closes its little mouth." As in the book's title, contradictions abound: what is called "tiny" is also "limitless" in these profound itineraries that float between story and song, hope and hopelessness, mind and body.— Catherine BarnettRuth Danon’s poems manage to fuse seemingly irreconcilable qualities: they are both erudite and colloquial; concerned with ideas yet frankly personal; they have the reach of abstraction while also being tactile and concrete. The result is a shimmering originality that makes Limitless, Tiny Boat a marvel to read.—Jennifer EganRuth Danon is the author of the poetry collections Living with the Fireman (Ziesing Brothers, 1981), Triangulation from a Known Point (North Star Line, 1990), and a book of literary criticism, Work in the English Novel (Croom-Helm, 1985). Her poetry was selected by Robert Creeley for Best American Poetry, 2002, and her poetry and prose have appeared in Versal, Mead, BOMB, the Paris Review, Fence, the Boston Review, 3rd bed, Crayon, and many other publications in the U.S. and abroad. She has been a fellow at the Ragdale Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ora Lerman Foundation, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She teaches in the creative and expository writing programs that she directs for the McGhee Division of the School of Professional Studies of New York University and is founding director of the Summer Intensive Creative Writing Workshops at NYU’s School of Professional Studies. She is a member of the Urban Range Poets Collective. Ruth Danon grew up in upstate New York on the grounds of the Binghamton State Hospital, where her mother, a Hungarian refugee, worked as a psychiatrist. She is completing aTRANSCRIPT
LIMITLESS TINY BOAT
RUTH DANON B L A Z E V O X [ B O O K S ] Buffalo, New YorkLimitless Tiny Boat by Ruth Danon Copyright 2015 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza Cover art: I See You by Gary Buckendorf First Edition ISBN:978-1-60964-209-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015937802 BlazeVOX [books]131 Euclid Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 [email protected] publisher of weird little books BlazeVOX [ books ] blazevox.org 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 15 IF THE POEM ANNOUNCED ITS ARRIVAL on a limitless, tiny boat, would you demand white linen on the table? a glass of water? I.THE ARCHITECTURE OF WIND 19 SOMETHING LARGER THAN THE SELF I DONT UNDERSTAND Going out is something a boat does leaving a harbor. I cannot explain many thingsfor sure not why the boat goes out. It is often this way for me, and the harbor is as puzzling a place as any with its ropes and anchors and greasy piers. It smells of mortality, dead fish against pilings and salt and always the impulse to flee. The waves go chop chop against the sides of the boat. The predictable storm ensues. No one remarks on the loneliness of disembarking, arriving at night, way too late, in a shadowed town and no one thereglad and waiting. 20 OUTWARD 1. I would never build a house on a steep inaccessible cliff nor in a solitary desert neither upon the eggs of birds nor upon a field of acorns. I did not say this exactly.I said I am alone. I am ashamed. I said I am so thirsty I want something to drink. And I said there are small shells crushed beneath my feet. And I also said one simple thing. (Never to go against the grain.) Think of this as a random series of facts. The real trick is to say it out as flat as possible. Really the trick is to estimate from here, the journey outward. 21 2. We begin at a fixed point, deprived of light. The tradeoff begins at the limits. Desire is a random fact. Think of it.Desire is interfering with me. 22 3. I threw the china out the window and the glasses and cups and all the pictures of him I had around the house. I laid out the tarot cards and the tea. I hopped on a slow boat, gave it a ghost of chance to get there. (All white stone is softer than red.) 23 4. Consider the simple tools. The ax. The ax making its own handle. (Never to go against the grain.) I do not understand you or your alternatives I said primly. (I am pinching my pennies.Eventually this house must fall and fall.) (Mousetalk) 24 5. Under the old paint, brass and glass, wood, the original gleam. Light and air. First I strip everything. Then I paint the walls. I have lost something I said and I want it back. I did not say it, but it is true that doors should imitate the windows. From whatever side we take in light we ought to have free sight of the sky. 25 6. I could simply start, could count myself lucky knowing that everything tends to a particular moment. How to account for it without falsifying the record. Talking is talking. 26 7. I can take a hard line when I have to. I is not a name. A name not claimed is no name. I will argue the point since I have no choice. Something is there, a boat in the water just beyond the horizon. You cant feel the boat moving but somehow it gets there. 27 8. A vision. The colors of an attitude. The sea rolling up. The boat on its path. We are neither of us where we think. You, the one who listens, you are a steady customer and you wait with your hands cradling the cup of coffee. Truth is in details. Trust me, you said suddenly, trust me. (What am I building? What house is this that we must work so hard?) And that great stretch of the water still to cross. But heres this. Acute. This certainty. Every other possibility has exhausted itself.