Patrick Doud's Blog, page 2
January 27, 2014
January 22nd, Gloucester Writers Center
by Gabrielle Barzaghi
pastel
12 X 12 inches
I want to say something briefly about my poems, Gabrielle’s drawings, and why we are putting them together tonight.
There are the fragile, doomed arrangements of everything, despite intuitions of another, everlasting world that touches this one, that enfolds us and extends beyond our knowing: as in my or anyone’s words of lives in houses and on the forest floor; as in Gabrielle’s woods and rocks and people.
There is a closeness in space and time, in plac...
January 19, 2014
October 6, 2013
Gabrielle Barzaghi
The Virgin Spring
by Gabrielle Barzaghi
Pastel
50 X 70 inches
This past winter, Cape Ann Museum exhibited a show of Gabrielle Barzaghi’s drawings. Her workis all visionary landscapes and nightmare fantasy situations, and I was immediatelytaken with it.
Gabrielle will soonbe showing a huge new workat Trident Gallery in Gloucester.The show opens October 18, 2013.
Gabrielle and I are doing a presentation together on January 22, 2014,at The Gloucester Writers Center.We’ll beprojecting images of Gabriel...
February 6, 2013
The Next Big Thing
I was tagged in “The Next BigThing,”a self-interview chain for writers with books coming out. Thanks, Mark Lamoureux, for tagging me. (Mark is one of my favorite poets, and two new books of his are about to come out or just out. I’ve already spent time with both; they arefantastic.) The timing for this interviewis good, as Ionly justlearnedthere actually isa book coming sometime soon.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
The publisher, a book arts studioin England called Some Odd Pages,su...
October 31, 2012
Happy Halloween
Here’s a poem for the day from my book The Man in Green, published back in 1996byLee Chapman’s First Intensity Press.
The Pumpkins at Panther Lake
Another ambivalent landscape, October
a boy hangs a dummy
from a flagpole into dark late morning
of interior embered still
with years into the earliness, the myth residing
at a barned-in shore, a
ghost-burnt afternoon gone north
for pumpkins on the swell of
all the riches of the childish and innocent
grotesque, affirmed in what the great
pillaring oaks by the...
May 26, 2012
The Publick Universal Friend, Mary Tammer: sources of The Mornith War
Across the entire breadth of New York State, undeviating, a hilly strip scarcely twenty-five miles wide invites the world’s wonder. It is a broad psychic highway, a thoroughfare of the occult whose great stations number the mystic seven. For where, in its rolling course from east of Albany to west of Buffalo, it has reached one of seven isolated and lonely heights, voices out of other worlds have spoken with spiritual authority to men and women, and the invisible mantles of the prophets have...
May 5, 2012
The serpent on the beach: sources of The Mornith War
As I was at work on The Mornith War,something mysterious happened inGloucester, Massachusetts, the city where I live.
For decades, a painting of a serpentine creature endured ona big rock onCressy’s Beach, a beautifulplace on the western side ofGloucester Harbor. Here’s a pictureI tookin 1991, visiting the creature withpoets Ken Irby (on the left) and Gerrit Lansing.
No one I ever spoke to knew who was responsible for the original painting, or who touched it up from time to time,keeping it from...
The serpent on the beach, The Mornith War
As I was at work on The Mornith War,something mysterious happened inGloucester, Massachusetts, the city where I live.
For decades, a painting of a serpentine creature endured ona big rock onCressy’s Beach, a beautifulplace on the western side ofGloucester Harbor. Here’s a pictureI tookin 1991, visiting the creature withpoets Ken Irby (on the left) and Gerrit Lansing.
No one I ever spoke to knew who was responsible for the original painting, or who touched it up from time to time,keeping it from...
Mourning doves, Lorine Niedecker: sources of The Mornith War
The Mornith War is full of things that got my attention at the time I was writing. Events in my neighborhood, my world … books I was reading … my nightly dreams and nightmares … whatever parts of my experience overlapped with the story I was telling. Here begins a series of short posts about these sources, each revealing something from outside the story that found its way in.
A common birdaround my house (I can see one perching on the peak of a neighbor’s roof as I write this), mourning doves...
Mourning doves, Lorine Niedecker, The Mornith War
The Mornith War is full of things that got my attention at the time I was writing. Events in my neighborhood, my world … books I was reading … my nightly dreams and nightmares … whatever parts of my experience overlapped with the story I was telling. Here begins a series of short posts about these sources, each revealing something from outside the story that found its way in.
A common birdaround my house (I can see one perching on the peak of a neighbor’s roof as I write this), mourning doves...
