Poetry is not a project: Noah Falck

Poetry is not a project, dat was de kreet die het pamflet van dichteres Dorothea Lasky samenvatte en in wie de dichter die wij hier voorstellen, Noah Falck, zich terugvindt. Een citaat van Lasky: “Nowadays, poetry critics and scholars often refer to an entire body of work by one poet as a “project,” but I don’t think poems work that way. I think poems come from the earth and work through the mind from the ground up. I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain.”
Lees je de gedichten van Noah Falck dan voel je inderdaad dezelfde richting. Zijn laatst bundel ‘Exclusions’ draagt dan ook een duidelijke titel. Het gaat dus niet over ‘uitsluitingen’, naar de heersende morele opvattingen, maar je sluit zelf een aantal voor de hand liggende mogelijkheden uit om een nieuwe kern te ontdekken en die in je brein mogelijkheden tot ‘uitwas’ te geven.

'Poem Excluding Air Quotes

Start with how your father died.
In the hospital, his legs
couldn’t even whisper beneath
the thin sheets. You sat in a plastic
chair and took in a view of the parking
garage. The hallway was busy
with the occasional sound of toddlers
chasing balloons, of nurses, fake smiles.
You decorated his bedside with a get-
well card from an ex-wife, a tall glass
of ice water. When he passed, you
wondered how many people
had died in this room,
on this bed,
at this time of night
when the darkness was making
a meal of the world.

Excerpted from Exclusions by Noah Falck, Tupelo Press

Gedicht "tussen-haakjes" uitgesloten

Begin met hoe je vader stierf.
In het hospitaal, zijn benen
konden niet eens fluisteren onder
de dunne lakens. Je zat op een plastieken
stoel met zicht op de parkeer-
garage. De gang erg druk
met af en toe de klank van kleuters
ballonnen jagend, van verpleegsters, neppe glimlachjes.
Je decoreerde zijn nachtkastje met een beterschaps-
kaart van een ex-vrouw, een lang glas
met ijswater.Toen hij stierf, vroeg je
je af hoeveel mensen
in deze kamer gestorven waren,
op dit bed,
deze tijd van de nacht
wanneer. de donkerte een maal maakte
van de wereld.

vertaling Gmt

Noah Falck (1977) is a poet and educator. He was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, and attended the University of Dayton. He is the author of the poetry collections Exclusions and Snowmen Losing Weight as well as several chapbooks including You Are In Nearly Every Future and Celebrity Dream Poems.
He co-edited the anthology My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry, and has received fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, The Ohio State University, and Antioch Writers’ Workshop. His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Conduit, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Ploughshares, Poets.org, and has been anthologized in Poem-A-Day 365 Poems for Every Occasion.
For ten years, he taught elementary school, and currently spends his summers mentoring young writers as a faculty member in the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. Now living in Buffalo, New York, he works as Education Director at Just Buffalo Literary Center and curates the Silo City Reading Series, a multimedia poetry series inside a 130-foot high abandoned grain elevator.

Poem excluding modern technology

You fill the pool with cough syrup,
and the hot tub with a thousand
hollowed-out cicada shells.
A man becomes the state bird
in the riflescope of a child,
and the trees remember
themselves as seedlings.
A teenager mistakes his shadow
for an old friend. Together they
think the unthinkable.
You climb a tree
and grow your hair shoulder length.
We are almost too young.

Gedicht moderne technologie uitgesloten.

Je vult het zwembad met hoestsiroop,
en het bubbelbad met een duizendtal
uitgeholde cicade-schelpen.
Een man wordt de mascotte
in het geweer-vizier van een kind,
en de bomen herinneren
zichzelf als zaailingen.
Een teenager houdt zijn schaduw
voor een oude vriend. Samen
denken ze het ondenkbare.
Jij klimt in een boom
en laat je haar schouderlang groeien.
We zijn vrijwel te jong.

I think poems are one of the few places in this life where you can be yourself. Whatever “being yourself means.” I think it means trusting who you are, but also giving yourself the permission to explore and learn more about yourself. Explore the private curiosities, concerns, and excitemen of your time. Explore the long list of things that quicken your heart. I like to think I approach poems in this fashion. But maybe I just want to bear hug the world with language.

I’ve been working out of my dining room for nearly 5 years, really since our daughter came into the world. However, I’m currently transitioning into a makeshift space up into the attic. It needs a bit of work or more realistically a lot of work, but it has a window and my old desk and I think that’s enough. I only recently began to drink coffee within the past year or so, before that I was a strict tea guy. I definitely need a warm beverage beside me during my morning writing time, that caffeine trigger, along with my notebooks and the books I’m currently reading. Sometimes I listen to music, sometimes I need total silence.

Histogram of the Moments You Were Alive

Take a deep breath. Find beauty in the bar graph. In the nerves of a river bending. The rodents now silenced in the walls of the house where you grew up. Remember the chapter trying to cancel the world. The one trying to save it. Scroll through the times in which we live. The intervals of hysteria when all the art is quiet. You know the story: Vandalism in the venn diagram; Wind in a valley filled with the same feeling of what dynamite does to buildings; And how ghosts interpret our lives the same as machines. So it goes. Time’s an ocean’s worth of downed power lines over a field of sleeping deer. A bonfire left alone for an entire season, blurring a ratio of color into the aftermath. Into the day. Ambushed myths smothered like clouds in a retelling of the sky. There’s something missing. Let’s say it’s the night with an endless vocabulary of darkness.

Lees: https://www.raintaxi.com/im-still-trying-to-figure-it-out-an-interview-with-noah-falck/

The Year Everything Looked Like Sky

Tonight I can’t remember
the specifics of our honeymoon.

You say typical, and turn
your eyes to our child

who clacks dolls together
on the living room floor.

I think of the photograph
of you on a balcony

in a black bikini
swallowed by all the light,

scattered storms widening
on the horizon, on your face.

Maybe the specifics
are more in how I don’t

remember the newlywed
conversations or the island air

rushing in and out of our lungs.
Rather, the room we are in now

and the meaning it seems to hold.
The patterns of the days we

spend together, apart, together,
apart. A sort of blueprint for
the weather we’ve become.

Poem Excluding Fiction

We live in the most fortunate of times. And
who’s to blame? Our moods like the four
seasons in a tinted window overlooking a
bank robbery. Everyone is raising children
on cable television, on leashes, on the slot
machines that have become our elegies. We
live other lives in high school, college, on the
porch reading the obituaries. Say I miss you
into the mirror while shaving, brushing teeth,
plucking something meant to grow forever.