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Overview
Scaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, Eléna Rivera uses the English sonnet as a scaffold to explore daily events, observations, conversations, thoughts, words, and memories—and to reflect on the work of earlier poets and the relationship between life and literature.
Guided by formal and syllabic constraints, the poems become in part an exploration of how form affects content and how other poets have approached the sonnet. The poems, which are very attentive to rhythm and sound, are often in conversation with historical, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources. But at the same time they engage directly with the present moment. Like the construction scaffolding that year after year goes up around buildings all over New York, these poems build on one another and change the way we see what was there before.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691172262 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/08/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets , #133 |
| Pages: | 104 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Scaffolding
Poems
By Eléna Rivera
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-17226-2
CHAPTER 1
JULY 14 FROM 80 LA SALLE
Dawn in the city, windows wide open — wham!
Slam! Screams! Now scaffolding confronts this hometown —
trash smashed, strollers, birds, doors opening/closing
Here happens, all day, tending to tones sounding
in our ears — Beep! Vehicle backs into street
veers round the corner — listen, take note of this
city waking, summer moistened with sirens,
syncopated noise — beats anticipate stress
as skyscrapers vibrate — "All's well," you say, "All's
Here" — a car idles, shakes, feeds the vertigo —
water the balcony's garden, hear children,
hear the blaring radio counterpoint to
the modest breeze this morning — back inside then,
at the desk, the sawed railings of the poem
JULY 30TH
The dictionary the eye the ear our lungs
open, engender "owl" here "genesis" there
Turn the page and all things come alive echo
in the imagination — the word leads us
into worlds into time into reverie —
And the real? what happens to reality?
No need for Derrida, the deconstruction
already part of the city's laws where we
live leave everything to measure re-measure
Construction and destruction, bricks are replaced
Without answers without frame the scaffolding
highlights the slab the bricks the mortar playpen,
not just whispers but its cinder block questions
From drill to hammer to threshold to discourse
JULY 31ST SHELL-WORDS
I put you together, fall in with the past,
return to fading atmospheres no matter
the pillars, columns, moments evaporate
Mourn the loss of light poet you wrote of this
not a new notion we look back always look
the woman tripped, fell, her head hitting concrete,
shocked by the body that aging monument
One page faces another where poets look
at shadows, illuminate the present place
The multitude must be in the words, allude
to the boundless past that sentence that binds us
crashes into liberty's baffling riddle
Boulders, ocean, and the old obscurity
What happened to them, us, writing in water?
AUG. 5TH
When a man is asked to sing of his anger
the risk is that without remorse virtue dies
War then is in the face, in this homelessness,
the despair which couldn't wait couldn't ask for
We don't talk to each other anymore we
email global reach managed minutes morning
to noon in the hospitals we are all old
forbidden to talk of lost sons, asked to smile
Enough, they'll hear the news, men in photographs
die and nothing will seem simple, their faces
especially where sorrow stretched everything
Maps point to? and defeat looms where? out there where?
Here the naked body is where terror lies
Guilt builds monuments, the way we spend our time
If we say it's all up to chance do we mean
a throw of dice or an unexpected risk?
Can we bear being battered with sorrow, joy?
Contingent one moment on calamitous
headlines, another by the fear of our death
Obliterated by confrontation — Job's
test? And if "Un coup de dés" then Mallarmé's
"le hasard" sits at a piano in a room —
Nothing but "crass casualty" obstacles these
obstructions that cover the rising of light
in the East — the painter's eye tailored by light
shares with us a gladness for color and sun
We need new angles from which to see look out
the window, there in the garden the gamble
AUG. 9TH
WAITRESS
The uniform the stockings the waiting, time
to carry the tray balanced for the banquet
Maroon and pink polyester with black shoes
"Cygne" or "swan" rushing across the ballroom floor
The pigeon place where the assembled come to
pick at steaks, filet mignon, ten per table,
swallowed between dances bold sweep of it or
left behind in the trash where no one can dine
Avenue block ballroom I crash into space
myself nothing a figure crossing the room
emptied of person and picking up glasses
The servers all speak different languages
Not there to sing with a lyre but to pour drinks
until the clock strikes midnight and we disperse
STARTED AUG. 11TH (FINISHED FEB. 20TH)
Being there one is struck by the difference
that an ocean makes — the park advertises
"How it used to be" charges admission sells
"Nostalgia" and "History" to the tourist
"Le passant's" aim is to complicate a view
To fulfill this pleasure a guide explicates
the art of falconry; its role in Britain
The family returns to the car, the hotel,
the next meal, finished with that site, surrounded
by a thin remembrance of a falcon's stare
A family "en route" revealed, translating
signage, instructions, "the way we used to be"
Struck by the absence of accompaniment
and what one can say in another country
AUG. 12TH WITH WORDSWORTH
What a surprise the fresh breeze, noticing it
Golden euphoria and wham! a strong wind
ever ready behind small experience
Words will latch on to air if you let them grab
burrow their way stick have you think you are it
Eenie meenie miney moe and the sweat drips
the shirt clings to memory clings years ago
And when you least expect it it all comes back
I'm at a window elated by the sky
the moment where lights branched out and I was small
A day where fireworks competed with lightning
We in the big city in our huge smallness
rushing in out of the bodega for beer
and chips cigarettes and "real" celebration
AUG. 13TH
The mind gets overfull on certain mornings
Maybe that's the way of the scribe to forage
and scour (note that trying to protect oneself
from language makes for a longing to comply
with wind-blown anger, impossible of course)
An aunt's stern eye turns into tugs in the mind
You can look up, instantly feel your wrongness,
how the fear of lost fondness undoes the mind
Hours elapsed, days, years, no breeze in the heat
Children then grew fearful of shadows and dark
Adults feel their passel memories heat cheeks,
"by the fall of a shadow across the ground"
The "pollution tolerant" Lindens and Oaks
witness our delusion, we work in the dark
AUG. 14TH
The form carries a one-way conversation,
site of separation brought into relief
A relationship between sonnet and "house"
the I that tried to run away, walls of snow,
and how invisible the girl felt, small, bold
Wordsworth would never scorn the form, his ground O
it would take me years to kowtow to this earth
quake and still resist the good loam, the concrete
world, think of man's enlightenment, follow paths
of beauty of sound of ideas and then dreams
The struggle for a way out, a faith in this,
through the house, past deaf-ears, into the snow filled
One forgets that the form is, a lamp transports
Oh the cold has clearly entered the sonnet
AUG. 15TH FOR WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
To have the kind of _______ that no one can presence
That will not hurt ____ even the smallest thing not
I saw a fly, now _______ circle around leaves gnats
That will not judge or cradle the cold or _____ turn
The self in this has no grace, ____ gratitude, no
thinks boredom the barrier when it's _____ gold, pure
energizes _______ jumps hoops just for grace, matter
if sweet _______ our fellow gardenias and herbs gives
We think of things as ______, correction reflection
The sweet can fester instead _____ the human of
When divided it's _____ surface that rankles the
with pain at the gate of self and its ________ structures
Poet remind me it's more _____ than need subtle
She crosses her legs circled around the ____ leaves
AUG. 16TH
Seeped in a nineteenth century piety
I see how I forgot to strip them the sounds
molded by my father's Eliot records
I see your method sticks to spoken language
cannot face or gauge every word in my head
I would stumble against the choir the grand voice
the sloppiness that I would be punished for
At eleven we don't think of what words say
In the twenty first century I desire
form that pushes the limits of silty thought —
the long and flexible so I can surprise
your privacy (I almost wrote "piracy"),
describe your spine curving slightly as I bend
back the pages, his soft freckled hand on mine
AUG. 18TH (VERSION 2)
He came out of the sea to greet mere mortals
Poseidon of the Mediterranean
The man I admired had no permanence,
he would always go back to where he came from
so the children thought when the world was color
There's a picture of the God in his swimsuit
hair floating, in profile, ready to surface,
but the past and the wet red rage container
saw the sea lion move from place to place, un-
tethered and the children watched his sheen rub off
in a dark apartment his sea charm broken
tethered to "responsibilities" bursting
with rage, smashed a catsup bottle into bits
as the world's color changed into black & white
AUG. 19TH
This year tangled up in last year transported
The mistake that we make of time occurring,
future fast-forwarding never quite finding
Ladybugs all we can ask of the living,
and of sonnets, when they get claustrophobic
Always have to have a very high idea
of what we do, how we end up "being" time
Do we tell others what or do we write words
This year lived in expectations nothing I
could wear and the past has a way of catching
Summer sky can be very blue the day cold,
picked up mistakes one by one, can you blame me
There were no rules, no regulations, nothing,
no wonder I felt trapped by the lack of them
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Scaffolding by Eléna Rivera. Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- July 14th From 80 La Salle - Sept. 1st, pg. 1
- Sept. 5th - Oct. 24th, pg. 25
- Oct. 27th (Revised Jan. 28th) - July 17th April 23rd, pg. 56
- Acknowledgments, pg. 83
- Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, pg. 85
What People are Saying About This
"Scaffolding represents a vibrant, exploratory addition to the venerable and diverse New York tradition of ‘city sonnets.' As among the teeming, gridded streets, the poems' play of pattern and randomness generates an electric dialogue between self and world, a dialogue replete as well with sonorous echoes from past and present masters (Roubaud, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Christensen, Coleridge, Wyatt, Donne, et al.). One poem declares, ‘what small joy then / the fitting of these wild pieces together.' Indeed."—Michael Palmer, author of The Laughter of the Sphinx"In faceted and fascinating turns of mind, these uncanny sonnets build a sensational edifice of canonical form and advanced lyricism. Eléna Rivera is a wonderful poet."—Peter Gizzi, author of In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011