Post by shayepoet on Jul 1, 2008 17:18:44 GMT 2
The Paragon
Kathrine Varnes
The heart of The Paragon is a 42-sonnet long crown, plus coda, in which two women
who've never met chat on the phone about their mutual ex-husband.
Sample poem:
Four Sonnets from "His Next Ex-Wife"
As I recall, he wasn’t willing to bail
on anything, not least the idea of marriage.
Sailing the bay with his sister and his parents,
I replied to his mother who used the word veneficial
"What does that word mean?" his intellect hot on the trail,
"And how do you know a word I don’t?" Off her chair slid
his sister, laughing, "My god, she’s your wife, not a parrot!"
He managed to smile, though poisoned by betrayal.
What should I say to ex-wife number two?
"He wouldn’t come to counseling when I asked him to,"
I offer up, then hear her scoff, "I wish
he’d done the same with me. I’m so damn pissed.
He admitted that he lied to our therapist.
I paid for that!" Talk about billets-doux.
"I paid for that talk." As for bills come due,
he was buying time. Turns out we both nicknamed him
Golden Boy, just after we stakeclaimed him —
his thick head of hair and charm — from an earlier fool.
"Trouble like water off a duck" he’d say.
He gave anxiety itself the slip.
Once, a handshake got him a scholarship.
Maybe pole vaulting taught him how to pray
upside down, propelling himself through air.
Or maybe sailing taught him he should catch
the wind for speed. Maybe he had to fib
like when, fourteen, he’d rig the backyard latch
so he could sneak out sans parental care.
But why? Did he do anything? He did.
But why did he do anything he did?
Remember his patient instructions for driving stick:
the logic of gears, the grace of a smooth downshift.
He stayed calm on the hills, no matter how far back we slid.
His favorite cookbook was The Frugal Gourmet.
He rarely repeated mistakes and laughed till aching
at mock dog snack commercials of my making.
He loved the film Sex, Lies, & Videotape.
His best, his worst—alluring ingredients
I still can’t detect. I tell his wife (who’s riled
up anyway) how we met for breakfast last year.
"I know" she says, too clipped, the edges tense.
"And later, on errands, did he disappear?"
I was in my hotel room when he called.
"When I was in my hotel room, he called."
"He called on that same day?" (I was surprised
but pleasantly. During breakfast we’d tried
remembering our landlord’s name, a bald
Irish cop, retired — a fair and solid
sort of guy who hadn’t overpriced
our place like he might’ve. Was recalling his name a guise?
Or was it wrong for me to feel appalled?)
"Yes. And we talked for maybe 20 minutes,
but his voice was reedy, and I heard electric
buses switching lines, folks talking. To pin it
down, I asked where he was for our tête á tête —
a pay phone outside a drug store." His old trick
acquiring new interest like an unpaid debt.
Raves & Reviews for The Paragon:
"The biographical note for the book cover artist—Ilya Zomb, whose Pleasure of Twisting seems precisely right for this collection—proposes that in his art “a humorous sense of irony underscores his slightly askew symbolism.” One might make the same claim for Kathrine Varnes’s poetic lines, which sometimes seem contrary to readers’ expectations, resulting in poems one can enjoy for the surprisingly risky twists they take and one can appreciate for the astonishing discoveries they make of what may or may not exist, as in the book’s concluding image where the speaker tears through silk scarves in a drawer to find a ring box and “look inside.” With the many examples of worthy poetry in The Paragon, Kathrine Varnes gives readers numerous reasons to look inside this volume."
-- Edward Byrne, Valparaiso Poetry Review, tinyurl.com/457ml7
“This is a dazzling debut collection. Kathrine Varnes writes about love and loss with such wit and in such brilliant formal terms that it almost doesn’t hurt -- almost, but not quite. There is deep sadness, joy, and wisdom in these poems. They are the work of a young poet who is already a master of form.”
--Jeanne Murray Walker
“A remarkably accomplished first book of poems, The Paragon speaks with such full-throated delight in language that its vivid and wry and sometimes scathing psychological portraits are freed from the bonds of the ‘merely personal’ and released, instead, into the novelistic realm of human experience. In the rich prosodic interior of these poems, the heart’s brisk dramas are played out with a Chekhovian intelligence and flare.”
—Sherod Santos
About the author:
Kathrine Varnes was born near Köln, Germany, on the day after John F. Kennedy was shot. From the age of four, she grew up in Los Angeles, learning to keep her cool around famous people. Some of her odd jobs have included filing engine gaskets, painting the names on racing sculls, and singing in bars.
Her book of poems, The Paragon (Word Tech 2005), contains a range of formal experimentations from the nonce to the avant garde, including a 43-sonnet crown in which two women who’ve never met chat on the phone about their mutual ex-husband. Recent poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Measure, Prairie Schooner and Black Clock. Her essays on contemporary poetry and feminism have appeared in various journals and collections including Connotations, After New Formalism, and Parnassus. Varnes is also co-editor with Annie Finch of An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of their Art (University of Michigan Press 2002 -- tinyurl.com/3mebmq).
After earning her PhD from the University of Delaware, she spent several years teaching in Columbia, Missouri where her new play, Listen, will be produced this summer. She now lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where she teaches at the University and coordinates collaborative sonnet crowns.
Website: www.kathrinevarnes.com/
Verse Daily: tinyurl.com/3tqwbt
ISBN-13: 9781932339628, 80 pages, $17.00
Wordtech Communications, 2005
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