DENISE
LIDDELL LAWSON
WORKING NOTES
If I could ask
for a gift, it would be to sing. As a result, I try to bring out the music
in my poems through the sounds of the words, the placement of the lines,
linebreaks, and punctuation. The forms emerge out of a process of copying
lines over and over (in longhand) in an attempt to see which words are
worth keeping. With shorter poems, I re-write the lines from memory to
sift out the nonessential. The material for the poems comes from my notetaking,
which includes dreams, experiences, quotations from my reading, overheard
conversations, descriptions of places Ive traveled, etc. These notes
accumulate and then from time to time I sit down and re-read them and
pull out images and ideas and lines that obsess me.
Two Poems
(and when does she sing)
(sing to herself)
(as her mother, in the morning)
(sings)
forgetful of error
I tender
an offering
of salt
ungainly affection,
knotted with
sweetness
cord or corridor?
desire, a scarlet
coat;
water glass
held to the skin
for coolness
I cant unsay
the night is
chalked with questions
and
I am wakeful
2
the whale, white
as candleflame, crosses the ocean
as easily as
a woman crosses a room
3
love those who leave you and return
4
returning home,
she
notices the tree beside her house
this, she decides, is loyalty
what is there to say except
a tree, rooted and solitary
7
she takes a ruler and erases it
using, as measurement, the phases of the moon
9
in a postscript
not mine
contingent ardor, the sky splits with color
what is place? anything breakable
tell it in the third person layered over the first
11
flank
ravenous eye, a white
camera
succession of color,
burning
kindling the senses trues the blade
mistaking I for I
and you for someone else
the history
of two voices
stripped
fidelitas
12
whetstone
cipher
last night the moon -- no, the sun --
glory and liquid
absence, the hollowed out
rainwater urgent for the sea
not mine, but my portion
13
two fortunes, cracked open, identical
speaker, layer the third over the first
kindle the senses, true the blade
as genesis, an asterisk in a french novel
fidelous in it capriciousness
15
my portion
strangers touch after laughter
BIO: Denise Liddell Lawson has been a member of Kelsey St. Press since 1990 and currently oversees design and production of selected titles. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and an MA in Teaching English from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. She teaches in the ESL programs at UC Berkeley Extension and Sonoma State University. Her poetry has been published in small press publications and two chapbooks: Where You Form the Letter L (SFSU) and Even the Smallest Act (Em Press).
