Stephen Cramer, “Curses”

Gleamed from gutter mouths, we knew their musicle before
meanings, the monosyllables raised to hallowed refrains
on our tongues. We glorified it, the older world of vice
& impiety. So just as we both wanted to be the fugitive
in cops & robbers, my best friend & I hid downstairs
& scrawled out a barrage of vulgarities—the heavy hitters,

of course, but then the half-dozen declensions of ass,
the lumped phrases of defecation,
the whole shameful lexicon
of anatomy. Then, those white
sheets defiled (microcosm
of our own soiled tabula rasa),
we crumpled them &—like shoving a bottled note to

the sea’s blind tug—threw them to the ditch at wood’s edge.
It was the same fertile gully where I’d picked, years before,
palmfuls of fruit &—the words monk’s hood, nightshade
still a decade off—swallowed them. I hardly even remember
being sped to the ER to have my stomahc pumped. Of course

our ink-spangled pages
never went anywhere,
though I wish I could hold
one now, dim record
of childhood’s vast
testing ground—the
necessary absurdity & litter
of it all. Instead, those lost

notes were draped with stray
leaves, coiled with briars
which could never quite
keep from reach those
sweet-looking berries
we were told not to touch
but had to. And did.

From Tongue & Groove. A previous collection by Cramer, Shiva’s Drum, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Grace Shulman. Other poems of Cramer’s online include “Fuel” and “The Ark.”

In an essay on the University of Illinois Book Blog, Cramer describes how moving to Vermont changed his writing, following the poems in this collection about life in New York City: “My breathing slowed, and I could feel my shoulders drop. Poetry, I’ve always believed, but could never, until now, prove, takes cue from your musculature. So my poems were relaxing a bit too, both in their syntax and their diction.”

9 November 2007 | poetry |

Our Pals at Bookgasm Need Your Vote!

Rod Lott, the editor of Bookgasm, is one of the four other book bloggers who I recruited last year to help pick up the pace on this blog while I’m off being a professional blogger at GalleyCat. All the hard work he and his colleagues have put into writing about pop literature has paid off, as the site is one of twelve finalists for the literary category of this year’s Weblog Awards. But if the site’s going to win, it needs your vote. More than one, if you’re so inclined after you’ve had a look—you can go back to the ballot and vote again once a day from now until Thursday. It’s not going to be easy surpassing the McSweeney’s fan base, let alone Neal Gaiman’s throng, but let’s make a respectable showing!

4 November 2007 | uncategorized |