9 SEPT 06
CHAIR (a drive)
I met Karen Garthe (rhymes with McCarthy, not hearth) a few years ago in an Ann Lauterbach workshop, 4 Sunday afternoons at the 92nd Street Y. Karen's life lately has seen some big changes: she's single again, has moved to a different Manhattan neighborhood, and her first book, Frayed escort, won the 2005 Colorado Prize for Poetry, judged by Cal Bedient.
I visited Karen's new place before she'd officially moved in (before the bookshelves were built)--Max and I met her there before accompanying her to a reading she did with Forrest Gander and Thom Donovan at the 11th Street Bar (the Reading between A & B) last March. Pretty much the only furniture she'd brought over was a large chair in one corner, which she invited me to try. "This is a great chair!" I said as I settled in, my feet up on the ottoman and my arms flopped on the ample armrests. "You can have it!" she said cheerfully, "I'm getting a new one."
I haven't had a comfortable chair since before we came east from Oregon and I sold all the furniture, half of the books, and chotzkes large and small to help finance the move. (Recalling those weeks of selling stuff, I can't remember who in town wound up with my old reading chair. The blue sofa bed I inherited from my mother, not bad for reading, went to a cousin of Bob Dylan's.)
I do have a small cardboard armchair in the studio, bought from the Guggenheim store when they had their Soho branch. We carried it home on the train, flat--then unfolded and assembled it in the tiny apartment where we lived then, behind the Chevrolet dealership. Holds a thousand pounds (they say), no problem there, but it squeaks with any slight shift (how cardboard meets cardboard).
In the house, we have two hard wooden chairs at the table (we did have a third but Max smashed it a while back, in a rare fury), and office-style chairs at our computers. Our bed, a futon, lacks a headboard to prop oneself up against while reading. Mostly I end up sitting on the floor to read--in winter I go for that spot in front of the low heater vent--but I've missed the pleasure of taking to a welcoming chair with a good book.
Speaking of good books, Cal Bedient's blurb on the cover of Frayed escort contains these lines I find apt: "Evading every opportunity to be obvious and tedious, the poetry somehow skips beyond even the need to be subtle: it is simply unimaginably imaginative at every point. The writing is at once lean and fantastic, crisp and mobile." In the most recent issue of Chicago Review (Spring 2006), Bedient also refers admiringly to Karen's writing in his essay "The Predicament of Modern Poetry."
Of course I asked Karen if she'd like to do one of my first-book interviews. She considered and declined, but when Max and I drove in to pick up the chair, the topic came up one last time.
She said maybe she just hated writing prose. Or maybe her changes were still unfolding. She was sitting in the chair we were about to take away (soon to be replaced by a remarkable chaise). I sat in another nice armchair, feet on an ornate metal footstool. Max roamed, looking at books and objects on the walls, now & then sitting on the rug (an Aubusson, for which he has developed a fondness). Eventually, he wrapped up the ottoman and chair in dropcloths and rolled them down to the truck.
Waving goodbye to Karen, we set off again, toward New Jersey.
We put the ottoman and chair into the studio, until we can make space for them in the house. They're so big, and I'm not painting at the moment. Now the room doesn't feel exactly like itself.
I don't feel like myself either--my life is changing. Though I'm not in a position yet to answer the question, I feel like a person who keeps asking other people: "How has your first book changed your life?"
A poem from Frayed escort by Karen Garthe:
The Azalea Bowmen
deer and the aucuba voice of the deer
the Azalea Bowmen
and the falling, thinning deer
spruce aside, needles falling
in the pool with the Girl with the Unwashed hair
off-center because the center's for God
red-faced "to break his bones"
's' a wacko now...
who should maybe been more of a wacko before
to Crash
in the Rockies
Crash who lost everybody, easily
talks with strangers
plays in the hills off-center since the center's for God
his bandolier flashing shoulder to hip
grows old conservatively, professionally
his luggage strolls on wheels
Soothing Crash
The sun
Tangled in a tree at sunrise
A man tangled in the sun in a tree at sunrise
. . .
