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Hand-Sewn & Signed by the Author

Limited Edition Set of 3

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For more information, email ifshedrawsadoor.com.

For excerpts, visit the Love Trilogy Page.

Love is form, and cannot be

without important substance,

the weight,

say, 50 carats, each one of us, perforce

a goldsmith’s scale

~ Charles Olson, “I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You”

For the very many of you who are dear & distant: thanks to gallery owner Robbie Schoen, creative problem-solving, a cement block, & some duct tape (not to mention the very helpful staff at Faculty Instruction Technology Services at UCSC), my love poetry & Tarot novel performance at the New Cadence Reading Series is streaming online (just click on the image above).

Because I teach university freshmen to express themselves and (in their terms) “think outside the box,” I spend a lot of time reading, thinking, and talking about first love, falling in love at first sight, and heartbreak. X, for example, tells me about how she IM’s her ex: I’m knocking on your door but I’m not opening it. I’m sitting on the stoop in my bare feet. Then there’s Z, who wants to seduce his politics professor but knows he can’t. In fact, Z’s not even sure if the professor’s gay; it doesn’t matter, he’s in love. Or Y, who insists that if you want to know how a girl feels, text.

Almost a decade ago, when I was young enough to love with the intensity, the head-on speed, the reckless faith, and the complete abandon with which the young love, I wrote “The Psychological Implications of Sex,” which incidentally, is the first poem I ever published. It goes something like this: love is incalculable, like pi, it like i is a number that can’t possibly exist, it suffers from unsolvable internal contradictions, it has weight and can’t like g be rounded to 10. (Curious? Click here to read the full version: The Psychological Implications of Sex.)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that for me this poem is about femininity & optimism. That love poetry for me is about femininity & optimism. That the place of poetry is nothing less than the place of love; of its shifting grounds, its human songs; the energies that are transferred as one relationship dissolves and another is formed, as the body says “Stop,” the mind says “Keep going,” and the spirit says: “Pack your bags.”

Then—perched on this sweet-smelling, knobbly-elbowed, just-blossomed cherry branch, I’m going to say click on the image, close your eyes & listen. I mean it. Click on the image & close your eyes. Listen.

Make some time for first love, for falling in love at first sight, for heartbreak, for falling out of love and falling back in: like humans do.

Love! & rockets, Emily

Feed your mind, body & soul at Gabriella’s Literary Salon with Dr. Emily Carr, Love Poet & Ecofeminist

Tuesday, February 5th

Featuring Gabriella’s organic farm-to-table cuisine, Love Poetry, Tarot Readings, & “Beauty & the Beef: The Damsel Is (Still) In Distress.”

Dinner: 7:30 pm
Poetry, Tarot, & Talk: 8:30 pm
910 Cedar Street
Downtown Santa Cruz
Reservations: (831) 457-1677

More information:
visit http://gabriellacafe.com/events/
or email ifshedrawsadoor@gmail.com

It’s (almost) February & love is in the air so why not join me for some healthy eating & good fortune at “Santa Cruz’s Most Romantic Spot” (Sunset Magazine).

http://horselesspress.com/2012/10

It’s a Sunday that can’t make its mind up about Indian Summer, it might rain or it might not,  my students & I are writing “emotional biographies” so I’m thinking through the predicament of family memories & under what circumstances we are held to the facts & whether genre is like Anne Carson claims something you recognize by its smell.

It’s the world series playoffs, I’m cheering for the wrong team and I like it that way. I also like the way this book (mine!) looks in the enthusiastic sunlight of late October:

What I would like to say to say about Up the Shinbone Superlatives is that I’m going home. Which means faith, ambition, childhood: a kind of “state of grace.”

The thing about leaving the Midwest as a young adult that makes it unlike other places is that you don’t look back. You are almost thirty, & still you know nothing of living, you didn’t ever think you’d be homesick for the Midwest when in fact its beauty can finally be seen because you aren’t there.

Ok. That’s the plot. Up the Shinbone Superlatives is a love story about what happens when you know you won’t ever go back, when you are old enough to understand that some part of our lives really do end, sometimes you aren’t that person anymore, some places, some people you can take with you & some you have to leave behind, there is such a thing in life—& some more than others—as forfeit.

Inspired by recent erasure poetry—like Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow (Wave Books 2006), Jen Bervin’s Nets (Ugly Duckling Presse 2004), and Matthea Harvey’s Of Lamb (McSweeney’s Books 2011)—I decided to think about collage as a way of surrendering to life’s essential incoherence: the way our experiences misstep or mistake, mishear and get lost in “what might have happened” or “what never happened” or even “what should have happened.”

I wanted to take the transformation one step further, and one brave month at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I transmogrified the prose poems in Up the Shinbone Superlatives into footnote to forfeit: autobiography of a murder, the second in my six-volume series of artist books.

footnote to forfeit is ransom notes on top of love poetry on top of rumors. I used Wite Out to obliterate the poems collected in the 1972 Peter Pauper version of Emily Dickinson’s love poetry. Then, (like the author of a ransom note), I collaged short lyrics over the Wite Out by cutting and pasting individual letters from a variety of vintage media (such as a 1970s issue of Better Homes and Gardens). This is one strategy for transforming transgression, faith, and forgiveness from things (as commodity) to events (as “matters of care”).

Select ransom notes are available for purchase as postcards or broadsides. Query ylimerrac@gmail.com for more information.

Now, dear READERS, I invite you to enjoy! Emily

Freedom!
Skipping Home a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

Freedom! My European tour is almost over—last stop: Paris, the Loire Valley, & Champagne. I’ve spent the last week glamping a few miles above Tintern Abbey & writing (in no particular order) about the number eight, a dying cat, cannibal chickens, the limits of Achilles’ honesty & the problem of Chaucer’s spring, unposted love letters, the battle of Waterloo & a ship too late to save the drowning witch.

Cedar Falls Cabin, Wales

Tintern Abbey

My latest writing experiment, Straight No Chaser, experiments with the “poetry of fear.” Materials include a seafoam green Hermes 3000 typewriter, spray paint, scotch tape, a fold-out Athens city guide, & the insatiable appetite of Frieda, Camac Cat.

Thanks to Frieda, who out of the purity of her nature is unable to resist the sparrow’s suggestion of food; Mary Ruefle, whose fabulous essay “On Fear” is at The Poetry Foundation (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/244158); & the residents at Camac Centre d’Art in Marnay-sur-Seine, France, who lent me scissors, work space & measuring tape, fixed my typewriter, bought strawberries & made Sangria, I’ve spent the last two months composing Straight No Chaser, the third in my six-volume series of artist books.

Straight No Chaser

Since I’m writing a few miles above Tintern Abbey, let’s start with Wordsworth. In his epic lyric biography, he writes that he was “fostered alike in beauty & fear.” Perhaps. On re-reading “Tintern Abbey,” however, we’ll find very little fear. For Wordsworth, fear is instinctual, animalistic, a relic of the physical activities (bathing, bird-snaring, birds-nesting, an expedition in a stolen boat, skating, kite-sailing, noughts & crosses & cards) of his boyhood; the mature poet who returns to Tintern Abbey looks to Nature as a teacher of those “aching joys” & “dizzying raptures” that might guide modern man in his search for spiritual freedom from the vagaries of civilisation.

Fast-forward a couple centuries & chunnel-surf to France. A half-eaten sun leaks through nuclear clouds onto a desultory elbow of the Seine. It’s mid-June; you are late for a very meaty very French dinner from which, being vegetarian, you will mostly abstain; poised on the catwalk from priory to main house & sans merci, Frieda the Camac Cat devours a sparrow. You can’t make her stop. You don’t want to make her stop. In the small bones of the inner ear reserved for your conscience—you can’t blame her. It is the most extra-ordinarily ordinary situation. So you turn on your i-Pod & hit record. It takes her five & a half minutes to finish off the entire squeaking carcass—head, feathers, bones, feet. Satiated, she takes a long look at the camera & stalks off-stage.

If God created the world it is just-so: sans merci.

As Barry Lopez writes in Arctic Dreams, “sudden, cataclysmic events are as much a part of life, of really living, as are the moments when one pauses to look at something beautiful.”

What I want to know happens if we substitute love for “life” & loving for “living”?

Those of you who are familiar with my work may recall that in recent years I’ve come to accept that I am a love poet. & those of you who have heard lectures on love poetry may recall that fear is often, precisely, the point. Love functions because of fear—because of what Ruefle calls “the error”: the full acceptance of what is violent & tragic in human desire, the knowledge that sudden, cataclysmic events are as much a part of love, or really loving, as are the moments when one pauses to behold the beauty of the beloved.

You might even say fear is love’s procedure; it is the fear with which we face that which we love most, or that which loves us most, that catapults us into what Ruefle calls positive capability.

In Straight No Chaser I interpret this to mean: fear as freedom, as the positive capability of rejecting our human penchant for verisimilitude & celebrating the vulnerable, brutal, imperfect, violent, tragic, mysterious, terrifying, & terribly beautiful nature of really loving. The freedom to, in other words, love the questions now.

Inspired—inspired, that’s right. Neither disgusted by nor scornful of. Inspired by Frieda, some spray paint & scotch tape, in the lyric laboratory that is Straight No Chaser, I ask, what might happen when fear replaces awe as the catalyst for the sublime?

For a few sweet previews & more information about my artist book series, visit the Lyric Laboratory: http://ifshedrawsadoor.com/everything-tarot/.

Emily Carr reads at the One Pause Poetry Project, http://www.onepausepoetry.org

Begun July 2011 & directed by the very fabulous poet Sarah Messer, the One Pause Poetry Mp3 Project is a national digital resource for teachers, students, readers, & listeners. Each poet is asked to record & submit three mp3 files to the site: one poem of his or her own, one by another poet, & one poem for kids. You can listen to me reading Emily Dickinson’s “Why Do I Love You?,” Lewis Carroll’s “The Cheshire Cat,” & my poem “yolk (v.),” which is from my first book, Directions for Flying (Furniture Press 2010), & which Marie Howe chose as Winner of the Winter 2008 So To Speak Poetry Prize.

You can also hear & watch performances by some of my personal favorites—like Paisley Rekdal, Mary Jo Bang, Suzanne Wise, Clayton Eschleman, Jerome Rothenberg & Mark Cox—as well as my former University of North Carolina-Wilmington colleagues Michael White, Sarah Messer, Emma Bolden & Patrick Culliton.

As American writer Josephine Johnson reminds us, poetry was honoured in the old days. It had a place in the social framework. Poets were “voices of wisdom, bearers of tidings good, bad, true, invented,” they were “newsmen & singers.” Perhaps the time will come again when poetry is honoured. Perhaps the time for poetry is over. For the moment, at least, poetry is still free it is a beautiful waste of time, energy, & dollars it is changing the world entirely forever, & I invite you, dear Readers, to enjoy!