Figures for a Darkroom Voice was written by Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson with artwork by Noah Saterstrom , and published by Tarpaulin Sky in 2007. To read selections from Figures for a Darkroom Voice and bios, please hit continue.
from Figures for a Darkroom Voice
A girl draws a picture of a dress & becomes kingly in her substitutions. I draw a candle shadow like a scar on your ribs. Please hold still, the reception can wait, the toy trucks & their drivers & wet cement can wait. A true offer made offense incarnate. By now, the dazzle of our girl's comeuppance doesn't rasp, pilfering a speedballer's lime in the hotel lobby. It can't even kiss the windshield good morning. Christmas is bad dresses in a shop window & the fat lamp in room 686 gets fatter on a new kind of classical music. A chandelier crashes to the marble floor in the film. A canister of dried mercury in your coat pocket makes it onto the plane. What poem wouldn't overwhelm the back yard in its blistering music? Loudness was never a landing pad.
The signal is two women standing side by side before the elephant door. Each time one of them speaks another metric layer of sawdust pours up from the earth. Their teeth, winter; their hands, gauze; eyes, little lions; their jewels, jewels. If a tree asks to be cut into a casket while a man dreams of sawblades from his skinny hospital bed, then the nameless boy's uncanny forgetfulness constellates a swarm of incorrect light. Who says pleasure means you have been weaned too early for your own good? Our private animals are not guardians of tenderness. Water bristles into snowy radio wires, until the pigeon boys ready their pencils, draw a train tunnel onto the kitchen wall like a huge mouse hole. Is this a part for touching or a touching part? The last car on the last train like a tinted memory carves a new set of tracks.
An axe splits a tree from the story of a woodcutter's lost children, but who splits you from me? Who splits the lighthouse in half? When heat brings down these separations, what revives you is not the boy with his wrong name, but the name with its wronged boy, an error in place of an outcome. A note about the author, cut with slant adjectives, trips its nouns around like drunks. You know the fable, how its boat filled with water when you held the baby until you weren't certain if its breathing had stopped or just matched your own. There is a tiny blue heart inside this votive & it marbles your house smoke in miniature deletions from a huge marker.
Biographies:
Noah Eli Gordon is the author of A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007), Inbox (Blazevox, 2006), Figures for a Darkroom Voice (Tarpaulin Sky, 2007; in collaboration with Joshua Marie Wilkinson), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Collins, 2007; selected by John Ashbery for the 2006 National Poetry Series) as well as The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta, 2004), and The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003). His work has appeared in Publisher's Weekly, Boston Review, Jacket, and others. He writes a chapbook review column for Rain Taxi: Review of Books, teaches at the University of Colorado at Denver, and publishes the Braincase chapbook series.
Noah Saterstrom has exhibited paintings, drawings, projects, and installations nationally and internationally. The recipient of grants and residencies, he also does numerous collaborations with writers and musicians. Recent publications include The Denver Quarterly and Tarpaulin Sky. With Selah Saterstrom he curates Slab Projects, a series of ongoing investigations which generate public works in the New Orleans and Gulf Coast region.
Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of several collections of poetry including Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (Iowa), A Ghost as King of the Rabbits (New Michigan), The Book of Truants & Projectorlight (Octopus). Forthcoming collections are The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo), Figures for a Darkroom Voice (with Noah Eli Gordon; Tarpaulin Sky), The Book of Flashlights, Clover, & Milk (Pilot), and A Brief History of Gossip (Dos). He lives in Chicago and teaches at Loyola University. He is co-directing with Solan Jensen, the feature-length documentary entitled Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape (a film about Califone on tour).
The signal is two women standing side by side before the elephant door. Each time one of them speaks another metric layer of sawdust pours up from the earth. Their teeth, winter; their hands, gauze; eyes, little lions; their jewels, jewels. If a tree asks to be cut into a casket while a man dreams of sawblades from his skinny hospital bed, then the nameless boy's uncanny forgetfulness constellates a swarm of incorrect light. Who says pleasure means you have been weaned too early for your own good? Our private animals are not guardians of tenderness. Water bristles into snowy radio wires, until the pigeon boys ready their pencils, draw a train tunnel onto the kitchen wall like a huge mouse hole. Is this a part for touching or a touching part? The last car on the last train like a tinted memory carves a new set of tracks.
An axe splits a tree from the story of a woodcutter's lost children, but who splits you from me? Who splits the lighthouse in half? When heat brings down these separations, what revives you is not the boy with his wrong name, but the name with its wronged boy, an error in place of an outcome. A note about the author, cut with slant adjectives, trips its nouns around like drunks. You know the fable, how its boat filled with water when you held the baby until you weren't certain if its breathing had stopped or just matched your own. There is a tiny blue heart inside this votive & it marbles your house smoke in miniature deletions from a huge marker.
Biographies:
Noah Eli Gordon is the author of A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007), Inbox (Blazevox, 2006), Figures for a Darkroom Voice (Tarpaulin Sky, 2007; in collaboration with Joshua Marie Wilkinson), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Collins, 2007; selected by John Ashbery for the 2006 National Poetry Series) as well as The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta, 2004), and The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003). His work has appeared in Publisher's Weekly, Boston Review, Jacket, and others. He writes a chapbook review column for Rain Taxi: Review of Books, teaches at the University of Colorado at Denver, and publishes the Braincase chapbook series.
Noah Saterstrom has exhibited paintings, drawings, projects, and installations nationally and internationally. The recipient of grants and residencies, he also does numerous collaborations with writers and musicians. Recent publications include The Denver Quarterly and Tarpaulin Sky. With Selah Saterstrom he curates Slab Projects, a series of ongoing investigations which generate public works in the New Orleans and Gulf Coast region.
Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of several collections of poetry including Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (Iowa), A Ghost as King of the Rabbits (New Michigan), The Book of Truants & Projectorlight (Octopus). Forthcoming collections are The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo), Figures for a Darkroom Voice (with Noah Eli Gordon; Tarpaulin Sky), The Book of Flashlights, Clover, & Milk (Pilot), and A Brief History of Gossip (Dos). He lives in Chicago and teaches at Loyola University. He is co-directing with Solan Jensen, the feature-length documentary entitled Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape (a film about Califone on tour).
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