New Mexico poet Tina Carlson's latest book, Obsidian, focuses on metamorphosis. She says poetry can take the otherworldly, the unsayable or the horrific and alchemize them into language that can move and sometimes heal. She reads “In the Palm of My Hand, Rivers.”
Tina Carlson: I love volcanoes, I’ve always loved volcanoes my whole life and I love to go visit them. The idea of metamorphosis is really fascinating to me as a human. How can we morph and change? Whatever it is that helps us write a poem, starts moving as long as we’re committing ourselves to the process. It’s moving through me, it’s moving through the psyche, it’s also sort of moving through the air or whatever it is, right? The creative juices, the collective unconscious, whatever. And I’m just trying to listen for that. The poem was inspired by a project, actually by PEN Norway, which is PEN International, it’s an organization that works against the persecution of writers and against banning books. And there’s a prisoner in Turkey named İlhan Sami Çomak who’s been in prison—he’s a poet, he’s been in prison for 30 years as a political prisoner in Turkey. Beautiful man. He’s written like eight books of poetry in prison. And PEN Norway did a project during the time I was writing this book where they asked for different poets to submit poems to send to him. And they’re going to try to anthologize the poems at some place. People sent poems to him from all over the world. And so, I literally wrote the poem for him. But of course, it’s about me. I’m not good at writing political poems but I wanted to write a poem literally about metamorphosis.
In the Palm of My Hand, Rivers
Because the fields of my childhood vanished,
I carry smoke in my hair. I bed dank dirt in my
hands. My father shook his wars, sank the hum
of their dangers in mud. The deeper he dug,
the more it smelled like bread. Mothers placed
seeds in the graves of those guns. I have not
forgotten the rivers that flowed underground.
How the cottonwood roots sipped, made ships
for my brothers and me. We sailed to places
where trees were called palm. Where night’s
catharsis couldn’t break us. If days were fruit,
those days were plums, succulent in their viscid
light and endless sources of juice. When fall
turned leaves to breezing husks, we blanketed in
mulch, with bulbs making food of the ground.
About the author:
New Mexico-based Tina Carlson is the author of three full-length collections of poetry including A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, which won the New Mexico/Arizona book award for poetry. She’s also an editor of the online journal, Unbroken.
About the host:
Steven Law is the co-producer of KNAU’s series PoetrySnaps! He is a poet, essayist, storyteller, and the author of Polished, a collection of poems about exploring the Colorado Plateau by foot and by raft.
About the music:
Original music by the Flagstaff-based band Pilcrowe.
Poetry Snaps is produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio and airs the third Friday of each month.