I didn’t know what I was doing or why I was doing it.Perhaps you guided me as if a path through deep grass, as if the color blueepisodic flare—and there were bags, baggage unclaimedand other women watching me, they seemed hurt—I had, I knew it,hurt them in some way. I was ill, I would have sleptlonger still, but that I was on the highway,the highway had a place for me to fill,so that when I came then to find you, I was late.Listener, no striving, in a sense, no choosing. I arrived,tiny weeds in my fingers, dirt in the skin of my hands.A monarch appeared behind me—a girl in the spray of the hose.These things are real, I’m telling them to youthough I’ve wanted to diminish them, to turn myselfharder. I am light,she said, I am stretchy, I feel like nothing and it feels so good.I feel like nothing, like I am nothing. I could play for 49 hours,for 49 hours and 59 minutes, and I would even playfor 50 hours if you asked me to, if I had to, she said. Listener, you are forbidden, far and unreal untilI make you up by telling youwhat she said.
Dear Listener
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“Dear Listener” from Underscore: by Julie Carr.
Published by Omnidawn in August, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Julie Carr.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Julie Carr is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose, including 100 Notes on Violence, RAG, and Real Life: An Installation, and Someone Shot My Book. Her most recent books are Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (2023) and Underscore (2024). Her co-translations of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory and The Book of Skies, were published by Commune Editions and Pamenar Press, respectively. Overflow, a trilogy, will be published sequentially over the next few years. Carr is a Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. With Tim Roberts she is the co-founder of Counterpath Press, Counterpath Gallery, and Counterpath Community Garden in Denver. She also hosts the podcast Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone.
Julie Carr’s deeply intimate collection, Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr’s foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac, tender, and at times erotic or bitter, these poems remain deeply invested in human relationships amid a life whose backdrop is human suffering.
Reaching toward the “ghost companions in the thicket” and to the beloveds who still “pulse with activity,” Underscore’s sonically intricate poems express a longing for dynamic forces of intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, and what Stark Smith called “overlapping kinespheres.”
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