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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781942683582 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BOA Editions, Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 04/24/2018 |
| Series: | A Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America , #41 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 104 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
RAIL
I find it here in the wild alfalfa, head full of anti-psychotics and blue rain. Twenty years old on a freight train riding the soy fields into the night. Leaning away from the shortgrass prairie, the black Mississippi of dream.
My brother asleep on the well-wall beside me,
nodding his head to the sway. What home are we leaving? What distances blur the electric fence? What hundred low thundering wheels of darkness are coming to carry us there? Rain and the singing wind, over the auto-racks. Staring out west at the stars of our Gods and the lonely dark stars of our hearts.
Boarded-up store fronts, burned down apartments, highway signs that only name the dead. We cross the station tracks,
the broken legs of Sunday chairs left rusting in the yards. We know the way the story ends.
Still, the whistle blows. The flare-stacks whip their excess methane candles against the night. The wheels that brought us this far still roll, still churn the polished iron ash.
The road goes on. The highway turns a deeper shade of black. And as the sun sinks down on the eastern Montana hills, peppered with horses and gun shot cars, the rails still lead us somewhere else, and shine in the falling light.
WHERE THE FEELING DESERTS US
I wake somewhere on the outskirts of Portland.
The crickets are singing. The train is refusing to breathe. Off in the distance a truck gears down on a service road bordered in trees. The river beside me, babbling kind. Headache. Earache.
All I can see of the field dissolves in a stale white blanket of moon. Nothing moves. Even the cold machinery seems to be riding itself in a dream.
Sliding away from the steel retainer walls.
Boxcars stalled on the next four strings. The train is my shepherd. I finger a dead leaf. Star-lights dance in the field beyond my cage. We are never returning to the field itself, only the mystery hidden inside.
Night after night in the speed of your leaving.
Soft of your veined hands tracing my thigh.
The flavor of dust where the feeling deserts us.
Maybe the blonde heads of needlegrass swaying.
Bodies of cows in the next field over. I pull up the blanket to cover my bare arms. Cool air filled with the pressures of falling dew. This is the best
I can give for a reason—the metal accepts you,
whoever you are. The train you are riding will only go forward. The straight line is perfectly clear.
HOLES IN THE MOUNTAIN
Even the dead rats in the alleys of Oxford,
heads crushed and tossed in a trashbag,
left to fester behind the fence, are waiting for crows to divide them, to carry their bodies away. And if not crows, or the street pigeons picking a leg bone, then the broom of a street-sweeper keeping a rhythm to one of the tunes in his head. Or the wind as it funnels the dust in a mini tornado above him. Because it isn’t enough to say God is the speed of the wheel that turns the sky, or that God is the distance between two trains, hurtling at the same speed toward you. It doesn’t matter what stories we use to explain these impossible themes—
they will always turn fake or explode in our faces. On Mount St. Helens the fires went into the roots of the oldest pines,
smoldered and stayed in the coals for a month before burning the farms on the opposite side of the mountain. They found this out later,
tracking a mouse through a network of intricate caves. We used to have ways of explaining our failures. Now all we do is erase them by spreading the veils of blame so thin. The scars on our hands are only around to remind us: don’t grow old in yourself,
don’t get lost in this scrimmage. Because even death, in its marble skies and free-wheeling borders is an art of remembering everything over.
And although the soul is a joke we tell to the part of ourselves we can touch,
it’s only because the soul is a fire, and laughs at our sorrow, and has already survived us.
Table of Contents
Foreword Nick Flynn 9
I
Rail 15
Thresher 16
Sunshine Liquidators 18
Depression 19
The Fog and the Sound 20
Oaks 23
Mental Health 24
Freddy Krueger 26
King 28
Where the Feeling Deserts Us 29
II
After Havre 33
Poet at Twenty-Four 35
Miss Diana 36
The Boy's Head 37
The Cloudmaker's Bag 38
The Book 39
Fly Fishing 40
Jesse James Days 41
Bolinas 44
Steampipe 45
Crystal Meth 46
Walls of the Jungle 48
III
American Freight 51
IV
Pike 65
Bellingham Fair 66
Once in the Rodin Garden 67
Mutants 68
Riding the Highline 69
Posers 72
Mercy Songs 73
Sleep 74
The Cloudmaker's Key 75
Heatstroke in Redding 76
Seven-Day Fast 77
V
Wolf Heaven 81
Titanic 83
North Shore Recovery 84
Splitting a Forty With Ant B 85
Northtown Choir 86
Minnesota Roads 87
Secret Air 88
Cry of the Loon 89
Dundas 90
O Day Full of Grace 92
Holes in the Mountain 96
Acknowledgments 99
About the Author 101
Colophon 104
What People are Saying About This
"Rail is a lovely book, strong and inspired." –Robert Bly
"This is a wholly unique and powerful collection of poems. The sense of purpose puts one in mind of Whitman’s 'Song of the Open Road.' Encounters with fellow vagabonds recalls the tramp-poetry of Vachel Lindsay. But the darker need to search for meaning in the American plains and points farther west—a vastness forlorn and almost unknowable—belongs to the particular vision of this poet. His journey through our national ambiguity discovers a flicker in our roots, a spark popping from obscurity that rises into the heavens. The lived experience behind these deft and subtle poems seems necessary, and reiterates the fact that resilience is not only a feature of the American character, it is a recurring tenet of American art." –Maurice Manning
"Brotherly love, a sense of displacement and lost time, and the deep care that reminds us of our humanity, form the heart of this book. These poems are a scavengers guide, a survivalist manifesto, a reminder of the way our daily experiences can fuel and forge our faith. A hauntingly beautiful and unusual debut." –Dorianne Laux
"Equal parts dithyramb and lament, the great American bardic tradition celebrates lonesome wandering even as it hungers for enduring communion. Kai Carlson-Wee is a worthy inheritor of its dusty mantle, worn by Whitman and Kerouac before him, and Rail is a moving testament to the territories of freight trains, Minnesota roads, dumpster diving, and brotherhood. 'The road goes on. With or without us.' Yes, but how much better to have this unforgettable music to guide the way." –Campbell McGrath
Interviews
Where did you grow up? How did that landscape influence your work?
I grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota, called Northfield. We lived a block from a railroad yard and my dad was the assistant pastor at the nearby Lutheran Church. Most of my childhood was spent riding bikes around the neighborhood, buying penny candy at gas stations, playing in the woods. It was a very American childhood. Sort of ideal. The town was small enough that you could bike everywhere, but big enough that you didn’t get bored. When I was fourteen my dad got called to a new congregation in Fargo, North Dakota. Everything there was much more conservative. The landscape was prairie and totally flat and the winters were impossibly rough. Some days were -80 degrees with wind chill. I started rollerblading at that point to take my mind off living there, and when I graduated from high school I moved to San Diego to be a professional skater. I didn’t make much money and I supported myself bagging groceries at a co-op, but it was a lifestyle I loved. I became a Californian and started writing poetry about my adventures. I would say all these landscapes factor heavily in my work, but I’m not interested in writing about place as much as the movement between places. Where we are going, what we are leaving behind.
How did you start writing poetry?
My first poems were actually love poems. It’s funny, but when I was in elementary school I would write these poems to girls I had crushes on. I was a shy kid and this was the only way I could think to communicate my feelings. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn’t, but it put me in touch with language in a serious way. There was one time I wrote a poem for a girl named Jill in my fourth grade class. I left it in her locker on the last day of school and left for summer. Nothing ever came of it and I assumed she just read the poem and forgot it. Then when I was in high school (after my family had moved to Fargo) our church went to a national youth group gathering in New Orleans. All the other Lutheran churches in the country were there, including my old church from Northfield. I somehow reconnected with my old friends and one day we skipped the daily service to smoke cigarettes in someone’s hotel room. This girl Jill was there and she asked me if I wanted to smoke a cigarette in the bathroom with her. I said sure, and we went in there and turned on the fan and put towels under the door so the smoke wouldn’t get out. She had her back to me and I could see she was breathing hard and I asked her if she was okay. When she turned around she had tears in her eyes and she said, I need to ask you something. I nodded and she asked me if I had written a poem for her in fourth grade. I told her no, it wasn’t me, and then she said, I know it was you who wrote that poem, and she proceeded to recite it back to me, line by line, from memory. I was totally blown away. I couldn’t believe someone had carried a poem around with them for so long, especially one I had written. It made a big impact on me, and I started to write poems more seriously after that.
What is your book “Rail” about?
I started writing Rail when I was in my early twenties. I was traveling around the country at the time, hitchhiking, train hopping, and working at a spiritual retreat center in the northern Cascades. While I was in college I had been through two mental breakdowns and had cycled through numerous medications and therapists. I found it hard to concentrate and there were episodes where I was incredibly paranoid and couldn’t read books. Words themselves would scatter around on the page. I became interested in symbols and various ways I could understand fate. It was a strange period in my life and I had a hard time holding down jobs and having conversations with friends. Out of all the medications I tried, I found writing poetry and traveling helped me the most. Anti-depressants probably saved my life, but they were a temporary fix. The real remedy was novelty and change. Rail is a documentary account of this journey. Partly it’s about traveling around the country, about the railroad yards and backcountry roads of the Midwest, but it’s also about mental health and the spiritual significance of the American West.
Where does your interest in trains come from?
Trains were a big thing for me when I was younger. Like I said, we lived near a train yard and we could hear every time they rolled through. They were sort of these mythic industrial snakes that would rattle through town and disappear in the fields. I liked how indifferent they were to the order of things, how they were always in transit, coming or going. My friends and I used to play in the train yard, climbing on the boxcars, and I always fantasized about living the life of a hobo on the rails. When I got older and started traveling around the country, hopping trains became a significant thing for me, not just for the lifestyle, which is wildly unique and unlike anything else I’ve ever done, but also as a throwback to the romantic ideals of my youth.
You also take photographs and make poetry films. What inspires this work?
I’ve never been a fan of separating genres. I’m mostly a poet, but I also write fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, songs. I take photos and make films. I don’t experience the world through language only—I experience it through a variety of actions, images, and complex impressions. I think if I only wrote poetry I would be limiting myself and exhausting possibilities, rather than creating them. We’re living at a time where everyone is using multi-media to make sense of their lives. Social media is a big part of this, but so is the accessibility of technical equipment and internet platforms. When you publish a poem now you can share it on Facebook, record yourself reading it, make a video version, etc. I think this is exciting and it gives poets all these new opportunities to imagine their work. Historically, poets have often worked in multiple genres, but haven’t had the opportunity to do it entirely on their own and share it so easily with friends. We all know the days of poetry on the page are over, but where it’s going is still uncertain, and the next phase is just starting to take shape.
Tell us anything about you as a working writer that you think might be interesting or unusual.
I used to rollerblade professionally.