Gale Marie Thompson

Poet. Baker. Dancer. Teacher. Athens, GA.

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Hi, I’m hosting Everyday Genius this month and I’m only publishing people I’ve never met. I’m also gonna post about it everywhere because that’s what I do man.

First up is Gale Marie Thompson.

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Agh I'm so happy that this happened, that markcugini and I had never met and that he is the guest editor at Everyday Genius this month, and here is this poem, it's an elegy, and Scully shows up and also John Wayne and kale and my roommate Chris.

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Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2014) and two chapbooks. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Better, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Best New Poets 2012, Guernica, and others. She edits Jellyfish Magazine and writes,...

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This is an interview I did a few weeks ago about my Elizabeth Bishop poem in the Banango cover poems issue. A lot of it's to do with memory, loss, and repetition. And some X-Files.

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NPM Daily Essay

Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2014) and two chapbooks, Expeditions to the Polar Seas (Sixth Finch) and If You’re a Bear, I’m a Bear. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Souvenir, Columbia Poetry Review, Better, They Will Sew the Blue Sail, Volt, Best New Poets 2012, Guernica, and others. She edits Jellyfish Magazine and writes, teaches, and lives in Athens, GA. 

National Poetry Month Essaylet—Stevie Nicks, Serial Poems, Voyager, and the Arecibo Message

Out of the almost impossible range of choices, I think the thing I love most about Stevie Nicks is that she just can’t finish a damn song.

While this isn’t one hundred percent true, certain songs like “Sara,” “Angel,” and “Storms” seem to carry on and on far past when the typical “song” might have finished, reaching farther and farther out into the recording space. Past the easy ending, out comes something else; then we’re allowed to sit with it; then here comes another phrasal unit, all relatively disconnected from previous lyrics, but seem to envelop image after image into what’s already been presented in the “main” song. A pinwheel of a song, given that we have enough air to keep it going, until finally she fades out (Lindsey’s doing, I’m sure). I love that. It’s walking through the snow, slowly, only enough to keep from freezing to death. It’s refusing to let us (or Lindsey) off the hook. I think of these endings as why I am so fixated on longer, serial poem types, particularly those in the female voice, and really, why I write poems at all.

 “Storms,” for example: already haunting and hollow and a kind of clawing out, the satisfying ending would be:

so I try to say goodbye, my friend

I’d like to leave you with something warm

but never have I been a blue calm sea

I have always been a storm

Instead, we reach this ending and we stall, hesitate, hover over this moment for a second—(Susan Howe, in My Emily Dickinson: “HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer.”)—then she moves on. We receive a string of phrasal fractures, beginning with “We were frail,” then moving on to unit after unit (“I should have known from the first,” “I’d be the broken hearted,” “I’ve loved you from the start,” “Save us,” “And not all the prayers in the world / could save us”), all about 15 seconds apart from each other. We become stuck, then we break free, only to become stuck, calling out, again.

I am thinking of the Arecibo Message, broadcasted from Puerto Rico in 1974 toward globular star cluster M13. It contains codified information about us for extraterrestrial species to receive, and a reply will come, at the very earliest, in 25,000 years. When we learned that Voyager 1 had left the heliopause and truly entered interstellar space, Golden Records—with a calling out from 1970s Earth—intact, I thought to myself: “and the starling flew for days.” That’s a line from “Sara.” What am I doing but a continual calling out, and then a wait, a calling out, and then a wait. When we shine a beam of light out into absolute darkness, the only way we’ll be able to see it is if something with visible mass interrupts it. Rain, dust, the ground, another person. Who I am only exists in my points of contact, in what is reflected back.

Taking into account any live version of one of these songs, and you’ve got a performance time that rivals a Phish jam session or Metallica drum solo. “Sara” in particular, on recent tours, includes a Buckingham/Nicks slow dance interlude and a microphone switch in which Lindsey sneaks up behind Stevie and smells her hair. But that’s another story. 

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Below is an essay I wrote for the NPM Daily tumblr blog about Stevie Nicks, the serial poem, and outer space. Thanks to Sarah Blake! There's so much more I want to say about this, but here's the beginning:

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3. The I is collecting documents in her body. Why are you writing me?!, it bellows. 4. Is always after—production from things that linger or lean back into. What is the nature of before as in the sentence has not yet begun?

http://www.thevolta.org/ewc25-dlmartin-p1.html

Dawn Lundy Martin - "25 Tiny Essays on the Value of Forgetfulness and Sleepiness"

IN the volta feminist issue. What more can I say, also incredibly helpful in writing these long poems and thinking about occluded trauma. 

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All the humiliations of having a body. Is it load-bearing or cosmetic. Not signing the paperwork isn’t an option. You can’t write while walking. Plotted your point on the backlit map. Maybe the painting is by the coffee shop owner. Only one possible future will happen.

http://www.around-around.com/end-3/

MC Hyland, "The End #3" at Revolver

I don't remember why this was so important to something I was writing the other day, but this is it, this was one of those poems. 

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It makes me want to alight on the thigh of my beloved like a moth because I know all careful grief comes out from behind the thigh and makes a fist at the grey sky above Brooklyn. The destroyed continue into the snow-filled future, shoveling.

Bianca Stone, "The Future is Here"

https://souvenir-lit.squarespace.com/bianca-stone

I never knew about Souvenir before, so I spent hours scavenging the site.

Also, I want to say that the way Bianca Stone talks about grief in her poems is so wonderful--it is bare and careful but recognizes itself and its own artifice and its own history in poems--and it's so helpful to me, now, and always, but especially in these last few months. 

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three new poems today at Eleven Eleven, and by new I mean very new.

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I'm in here! I've got a poem in here! No, that's not true--I've got a LINE in here! From a poem in Banango Street! WAOW. 

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http://sixthfinch.com/cabrera1.html

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Darker now in a new kind of body, I go in fear of metals, of what I would open a mouth to say, colored pumpkin-like or worse, I am in a room, what happens next: mostly melody, mostly reaching back toward regret. Bleating a white morning into sheets, do the ferns panic when I do, do necessary facts of anything go on, here how doubly light floats in a bedroom. I would un-name best practice slicing the fruit, how like access, how unsent the letters when inked already. New ways stuffed silhouette-like. New song like almost heard.

Wendy Xu, from Panic Chorus

http://thefiddleback.com/issue-items/from-panic-chorus

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I learn the word missive only after impersonating a stranger. If I move around inside a voice. If I put both hands cleanly through an arm-hole. Who is anyone if not usually incorrect? Which is to say I reject the idea of unmovable lines.

Wendy Xu, from Panic Chorus 

http://www.thevolta.org/twstbs-poem57-wxu.html

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Helen in Egypt, Eidolon, Book III: 4 Helen herself seems almost ready for this sacrifice—at least, for the immolation of herself before this greatest love of Achilles, his dedication to “his own ship” and the figurehead, “an idol or eidolon … a mermaid, Thetis upon the prow.” Did her eyes slant in the old way? was she Greek or Egyptian? had some Phoenician sailor wrought her? was she oak-wood or cedar? had she been cut from an awkward block of ship-wood at the ship-builders, and afterwards riveted there, or had the prow itself been shaped to her mermaid body, curved to her mermaid hair? was there a dash of paint in the beginning, in the garment-fold, did the blue afterwards wear away? did they re-touch her arms, her shoulders? did anyone touch her ever? Had she other zealot and lover, or did he alone worship her? did she wear a girdle of sea-weed or a painted crown? how often did her high breasts meet the spray, how often dive down?

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15449 (via whalegreetings)

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I know grace is not a man, really I do, nor is it the word husband anywhere on my body. I know grace to be twisting the most fierce likeness of a kiss. To make the colour-blind boy weep red.

Rubies for Dorothea Lasky, by Caroline Crew at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/english/nashvillereview/archives/6661

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I just want to be held by the air with everything breathing, to be part of the white vibrations that happen every night before sleeping, to be tossed through the world so fucked up and azure in every search engine, with friends goofing at the barricades covered in raspberry syrup, for most of my life to smell like nutmeg. It’s simple enough to completely plow me over. Some static in the radio’s belly, a sandwich aglow in an empty room, love letters without margins, and the fire I set in our house finally taking to the sea. A kiss is a decision I make to fool my body into being endless.

"Another Door" by Nick Sturm at http://www.pen.org/poetry/another-door

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Okay so here is a post where I will make a pretty worthy promise that I will start posting and remembering all the things and smart things and good things I read. Here's to 2014 being a year I'm no longer worthless!

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poem attacking