#Midwest Eclogue

[havingapoemwithyou]

midwest eclogue by Stacie Cassarino

#Stacie Cassarino #poetry #poem #september

[firstfullmoon]

Stacie Cassarino, “Midwest Eclogue” [ID in ALT]

#love there are things i cannot name #w #poetry #stacie cassarino #the inconsolable season

[shoshiwrites]

10 & 23 for the writer asks? 💕

This got uh. Waaaay too long.

10. Has a piece of writing ever “haunted” you? Has your own writing haunted you? What does that mean to you?

I am honestly not sure what it means to me, or at least I am not sure I could describe it in words.

I find it hard to separate writing that’s haunting because of some element of the style itself, from writing that’s haunting because it describes something haunting (probably explains why I am haunted by Wikipedia pages and old homemade websites in all honesty). 

Usually I would say, quotes/passages that continue to pop into my head regardless of whether or not I’ve consciously decided to revisit them. 

Off the top of my head, and I am 100% forgetting things:

Summer Solstice and Midwest Eclogue by Stacie Cassarino.

The beginning of Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson where he talks about the dangers of diving and how divers can become disoriented and lost exploring a wreck. I read this in the library of a B&B in Vermont probably 15 years ago and still think about it so. 

There’s a passage in Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s Growing Up in Coal Country about the breaker boys inventing their own sign language that I think about at least once a week.

The portions of Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat that talk about Joe Rantz’s upbringing and that of his wife Joyce, and their relationship. Like I did cry and I want to cry again every time I think about it.

Easy Company Soldier by Donald Malarkey. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a reread but - mainly the passages where he talks about Oregon, and about Joe Toye. You can never say I am unpredictable. 

Résistance by Agnès Humbert. I went through a period in high school of reading and rereading this book a lot which…idk what to make of that, tbh. It’s very heavy and very…good, which is probably an inappropriate adjective for a memoir that includes the author’s experiences of being enslaved by the Nazis. There’s a portion of the epilogue (?) or introduction (I think? Or possibly even a footnote) by Barbara Mellor that talks about the fate of the fighters imprisoned at Fort Mont-Valérien that I still think about.

By that same token, Martha Gellhorn’s writing on similar horrors, and that is definitely for her style as well as the facts of what she’s describing.

In terms of being haunted by my own writing, I would say…sometimes? It’s usually really wrapped up in the research I might be doing for, getting immersed? Also definitely tied to the sort of pandemic atmosphere/time when I wasn’t working and my days were very unstructured and it was summer and very easy to get lost in things. I would say the reincarnation/disaster AU which I’m sure is very surprising. Just lots of ideas swirling around and reading about awful things and that landscape. Other than that, I can’t really think of another piece? Possibly the first scene I wrote of Jo and Frankie together, but that was more of a fever dream, have-to-get-it-on-the-page vibe rather than a haunting. Possibly these are the same??

23. Describe the physical environment in which you write. Be as detailed as possible. Tell me what’s around you as you work. Paint me a picture.

I…am very variable in where I write, which is usually one of several spots around the house — the living room mostly, or my room, or our “guest room” aka home office/home gym/storage area/it has an old armchair that I like and no one else in the family does. The constants are usually: a glass of water on the side table and the remains of an iced coffee beverage, pillows and/or blankets, natural light if I can (though my room is not the place for that), terrible posture, and I am usually in comfy clothes if not in my actual pajamas. 

If I’m in the living room or guest room the TV is usually on low, sometimes with a writing playlist on Spotify (yes I have both on at the same time) but it really depends — sometimes I do just the music, sometimes I need silence.

#basilone #answered #thank you so much!!<3 #warnings for....some things #i just typed up answers for a handful of these so spam coming

[apoemaday]

Midwest Eclogue

by David Baker

We wade into a blackened pond to save the dying water. The water isn't dying —we know, we know—it's the fish and frogs starving, pushed out by subsurface growth.

Still, that's how they put it to us, our new neighbors who've come to watch their new neighbors cope with a stagnant, weedy, quarter-acre runoff swamp.

They say, let it go, by which they mean (this from Scott, cut like a side of beef, six-pack belted like a holster to his pants) it's God's will, or nature's, and besides it's too much work,

to which his father John, bigger, beer- gutted, bald scorch of a face, plops on our dock and says You got that right. At first we tried sprinkling chemicals around the darkening perimeter—to wit,

copper sulfate penta- hydrate (CuSo4—5H2O), used variously as a micronized fungicide in pellets, a crystalline pesticide "noted for acute toxicity in bees,"

and here, a powdery "powerhouse algaecide"— or in other words (this from John), fancy sun-block for the water. For weeks the bottom- black surface glowed eerily aquamarine,

yet all that died were two fat grass carp, lazy from the slime they ate, who floated up like scaly logs to petrify. That's why I'm waist-deep where my neighbors watch, rowing

with a rake through a sludge of leaves, stirring algae in a cooking pot, dragging it through the muddy pool. Each time I pull a gob of slime and glop, dark as organs, toward shore,

John yells out, encouraging, that's a good one, and I shove it on to Ann to rake up the bank where we'll haul it off some day. Don't just sit there in the willow shade,

I ought to shout. Come on. Help us out. Or (this from Virgil, via Corydon), why not at least go about some needful task? But there's so much trouble in the world these days

I've been content to work in peace beside my wife, my life's surprising love, to keep the cardinals throbbing in our close cattails and frogs at home in a splash of breathable water.

Each step stirs a slick of spreading ooze that follows orbital in my wake, a little nebula of oil and algae stars. And look, overhead the first real star

has answered back: There's darkness on the way. We drag one more sloppy mass up the bank and see its dimming possibilities— tadpoles and minnows, shiny as coins, egg-

clusters of sun perch, bluegill roe— throbbing in the grass, twisting to be loose, aglow against the color of the coming night. And there go John and Scott, down on their knees in the grass,

untangling as many as they can to slip back to the black pond, before the sky turns black as well. There's smoke you can see from the neighbors' chimney, and the shadows of the hills are lengthening as they fall.

#poetry #david baker #midwest eclogue

[hiddenshores]

The first day it feels like fall I want to tell my secrets recklessly until there is nothing you don’t know that would make your heart change years from now. How foolish we are to believe we might outlive this distance. I don’t know the names for things in the prairie, where the expanse of light and the hissing of tall stalks makes me move slowly, like in another country before I must share it with anyone. In what do you believe? In September’s slight motion of particulars, in the weight of birds, in lust, propulsion, maps that lie. You should not have loved me. Now: goldenrod, prairie-clover, the ovate-leafted bluebell with its open throat, saying how did you expect to feel? The colonies of prairie-smoke and pods turning golden and papery, the grassy plains iterating patience, and things I cannot name. Begin with apples reddening. Begin with a woman touching the cities in your feet. Hartford, Anchorage, the Bronx. Did you ever see yourself as more than yourself? I walk into a part of afternoon that deepens inventing an endpoint for sadness. Everyone is gone. On the subject of deception, where do you stand? There’s a chill in the air and the flowers know, the goddamned flowers, their loosed color. Sometimes we are cruel and we mean it. We author the house with its threadbare linens, the false miniatures of people saying look at me. Will the landscape forgive you? Is it yours to describe? What is the sound inside your mouth? I’m surrounded by grasslands in every direction. The sound is a clamoring, because desire is never singular and we want it this way. We want it easy. I have already let go of summer. Here, the wind – dispersal of seed and story. Love, there are things I cannot name.

Stacie Cassarino, “Midwest Eclogue”, in Zero At The Bone

#stacie cassarino #Midwest eclogue #zero at the bone #poetry #lit

[merulae]

Midwest Eclogue

The first day it feels like fall I want to tell my secrets recklessly until there is nothing you don’t know that would make your heart change years from now. How foolish we are to believe we might outlive this distance. I don’t know names for things in the prairie, where the expanse of light and the hissing of tall stalks make me move slowly, like in another country before I must share it with anyone. In what do you believe? In September’s slight motion of particulars, in the weight of birds, in lust, propulsion, maps that lie. You should not have loved me. Now: goldenrod, prairie-clover, the ovate-leafed bluebell with its open throat saying how did you expect to feel? Colonies of prairie-smoke and pods turning golden and papery, the grassy plains iterating patience, and things I cannot name. Begin with apples reddening. Begin with a woman touching the cities in your feet. Hartford, Anchorage, the Bronx. Did you ever see yourself as more than yourself? I walk into a part of afternoon that deepens inventing an endpoint for sadness. Everyone is gone. On the subject of deception, where do you stand? There’s a chill in the air and the flowers know, the goddamned flowers, their loosed color. Sometimes we are cruel and we mean it. We author the house with its threadbare linens, the false miniatures of people saying look at me. Will the landscape forgive you? Is it yours to describe? What is the sound inside your mouth? I’m surrounded by grasslands in every direction. The sound is a clamoring, because desire is never singular and we want it this way. We want it easy. I have already let go of summer. Here, the wind— dispersal of seeds and story. Love, there are things I cannot name.

–Stacie Cassarino, from Zero at the Bone

#cool... just destroy me... #poetry #Stacie Cassarino #Midwest Eclogue #Zero at the Bone #lit

[hush-syrup]

In what do you believe? In September’s slight motion of particulars, in the weight of birds, in lust, propulsion, maps that lie.

From Midwest Eclogue by Stacie Cassarino

#Midwest Eclogue #lit #literature #poem #poet #poetry #stacie cassarino

[boycott-love]

"Midwest Eclogue" —Stacie Cassarino The first day it feels like fall I want to tell my secrets recklessly until there is nothing you don't know that would make your heart change years from now. How foolish we are to believe we might outlive this distance. I don't know names for things in the prairie, where the expanse of light and the hissing of tall stalks make me move slowly, like in another country before I must share it with anyone. In what do you believe? In September's slight motion of particulars, in the weight of birds, in lust, propulsion, maps that lie. You should not have loved me. Now: goldenrod, prairie-clover, the ovate-leafed bluebell with its open throat saying how did you expect to feel? Colonies of prairie-smoke and pods turning golden and papery, the grassy plains iterating patience, and things I cannot name. Begin with apples reddening. Begin with a woman touching the cities in your feet. Hartford, Anchorage, the Bronx. Did you ever see yourself as more than yourself? I walk into a part of afternoon that deepens inventing an endpoint for sadness. Everyone is gone. On the subject of deception, where do you stand? There's a chill in the air and the flowers know, the goddamned flowers, their loosed color. Sometimes we are cruel and we mean it. We author the house with its threadbare linens, the false miniatures of people saying look at me. Will the landscape forgive you? Is it yours to describe? What is the sound inside your mouth? I'm surrounded by grasslands in every direction. The sound is a clamoring, because desire is never singular and we want it this way. We want it easy. I have already let go of summer. Here, the wind-- dispersal of seeds and story. Love, there are things I cannot name.

#poetry #lit #poem #Stacie Cassarino #Midwest eclogue

[sublimate-blog]

The first day it feels like fall I want to tell my secrets recklessly until there is nothing you don’t know that would make your heart change years from now. How foolish we are to believe we might outlive this distance. I don’t know names for things in the prairie, where the expanse of light and the hissing of tall stalks make me move slowly, like in another country before I must share it with anyone. In what do you believe? In September’s slight motion of particulars, in the weight of birds, in lust, propulsion, maps that lie. You should not have loved me. Now: goldenrod, prairie-clover, the ovate-leafed bluebell with its open throat saying how did you expect to feel? Colonies of prairie-smoke and pods turning golden and papery, the grassy plains iterating patience, and things I cannot name. Begin with apples reddening. Begin with a woman touching the cities in your feet. Hartford, Anchorage, the Bronx. Did you ever see yourself as more than yourself? I walk into a part of afternoon that deepens inventing an endpoint for sadness. Everyone is gone. On the subject of deception, where do you stand? There’s a chill in the air and the flowers know, the goddamned flowers, their loosed color. Sometimes we are cruel and we mean it. We author the house with its threadbare linens, the false miniatures of people saying look at me. Will the landscape forgive you? Is it yours to describe? What is the sound inside your mouth? I’m surrounded by grasslands in ever direction. The sound is a clamoring, because desire is never singular and we want it this way. We want it easy. I have already let go of summer. Here, the wind— dispersal of seeds and story. Love, there are things I cannot name.

Midwest Eclogue, Stacie Cassarino

( via rabbit-light)

#poetry #midwest eclogue #stacie cassarino

[hush-syrup]

How foolish we are to believe we might outlive this distance.

From Midwest Eclogue by Stacie Cassarino

#midwest eclogue #stacie cassarino #lit #literature #poem #poetry #poet