The book release for Elyse Brownell's new book, Sinkhole will be held at Buchanan's Coffee Pub in Boulder, CO on Saturday, January 24, 2015 at 6:30PM. Books will be available for purchase. Other features include Eric Ranaan Fischman and musician Kevin Ventsias. See you there!
Elyse Brownell's new book Sinkhole won the 2014 Poetry Chapbook Contest by Monkey Puzzle Press. The book is now available for pre-order here.
SEE A PREVIEW Here's what's being said about Sinkhole:
"Elyse Brownell's Sinkhole is a poem-study of loss and the holes that define it (and us, more than we might like to admit). The poem moves in branching directions simultaneously and feels its way as present becomes past and remains an ache of absence in the next present. As the poem looks further into these holes, time opens, and the assumption that 'there is a bottom to memory' becomes questionable."
"Sinkhole is a brilliant, lyrical, evocative exploration of the pain and loss trapped inside the sinkholes of every relationship. Elyse Brownell fearlessly furrows into those holes in search of a missing friend/partner/lover, the ‘you’ of the poems, but the bottom keeps falling away as one absence leads inevitably to another. Sinkhole is a profoundly ambiguous and lyrically haunting journey into the unknown."
— Bob Mayberry, Associate Professor, English, California State University Channel Islands
"There is a kind of writing or writer that is about living on the edge of what wants to be written: without reserve. Elyse Brownell went to the perimeter or brink of a sinkhole, for example, and lay down. What happens when you touch the inside of something that has no outside? How do you return? Jack Kerouac would have loved this book, I think. I did. It is a book from the heart, for you—and anyone else who wants to live wildly and all at once."
"Sinkhole is a beautifully concise poetic meditation on our modern condition, on news of sinkholes under our houses and on the ‘holes’ between us and through us. Elyse Brownell writes with wit and tenderness, integrating quotes from CNN and ABC News and from science, and finding poignant significance in how we try to connect with each other and make meaning. The opening epigraph, ‘it started in the bedroom, like so many things do,’ shows her underlying humor and psychology. These are imagistic untitled poems that accumulate by the short volume’s end to mean much more than the sum of the parts. We can try to ‘talk louder’ and scare away what frightens us, but Brownell walks to look right at our losses—singing them, mourning them, and celebrating them. I love this poetic debut and recommend it highly."
We Two Crows are happy to announce that Elyse Brownell has won the 2014 Monkey Puzzle Press Poetry Chapbook contest for her collection, Sinkhole. In addition to her first place winnings, Brownell's book is now forthcoming from the amazing editors at Monkey Puzzle. Be on the lookout for this amazing new work.
Check out the Monkey Puzzle Press website for the exciting details!
An EXCERPT from A METHOD
AND APPARATUS OF ARRIVAL AND/OR DEPARTURE
Elyse Brownell
FIELD
The
presented poem is broadly directed toward what it means to arrive and what it
means to depart, as well as the steps and materials needed to leave. Such a
system will prevent entrapment, loneliness, and other mental conditions.
ABSTRACT
Presented
is one method and apparatus of arrival and/or departure having an aperture of
the space-time continuum for the sake of travelling from one location to
another location. Specifically, what are
the steps needed to take in order to come to the decision to leave one
location, to depart, and to arrive in another location, to arrive. Furthermore, what is contained in the
decision to leave said location, i.e., the heart, a hollow muscle or organ that
pumps blood throughout the blood vessels, among other methods. Further, further, this one method of arrival
and/or departure is one that could not be ignored, avoided, or prevented.
BACKGROUND
There
is that check-in that you must procure.
Which, if you think about it, you’re just reconfirming the confirmation
you’ve already made and if you’re not “checking” bags but rather carrying them
on your persons, then what is the point of the check-in? To Check-In: the process whereby a person
announces their arrival. Airport: I am
arriving. What it means to arrive. To
carry your body across point A to arrive at point B. With arrival comes the
departure, the departure of body, waiting, sitting still, crossing lands and
oceans. Fall asleep in one state wake up
in another. Insomnia. I am body awake beneath this dream. Lover, I am awake
beneath this realm holding your hand in another state. When we arrived we
departed. When we departed we
arrived.
The
following listing of claims will replace all prior versions/listings of claims
in the above-captioned poem:
What
is Claimed:
1.
A decision to leave, comprising:
a reason, consisting of:
i) a need to see
a person whom you have not seen in a long time, said time greater than or
directly equal to six months, said months comprising the Gregorian calendar of
months; and
ii) a want, a
feeling you cannot contain, like sunlight in a glass jar, like, holding a hand
a little longer, a little softer, said hand relative to the person whom you
have not seen in a long time, said time greater than or directly equal to six months,
said months comprising the Gregorian calendar of months;
monetary value greater than or
equal to the cost of your heart, comprising:
i) a hollow
muscle or organ that pumps blood throughout the blood vessels, relative to
cardiac, relative to emotion, directly comprising:
collections of de-oxygenated blood;
a mesh work of cardiac muscle cells; and
love: a variety of feelings, states, and attitudes.
2. The assembly of claim 1, wherein a
circumstance does not prevent a person from making said decision.
3. The assembly of claim 1, wherein the need is
not in direct contact with selfish reasons to arrive at said decision.
4. The assembly of claim 1, wherein the want
cannot be avoided at any cost, wherein the sunlight in a glass jar is a
metaphor but the holding of a hand is literal.
5. The assembly of claim 1, wherein the monetary
value is on a scale of USD and heart strings, of which are equivalent to the
relation of the amount of heart strings that will deteriorate if a person does
not make the decision to leave.
6. The assembly of claim 1, wherein the heart
remains inside the chest of the person who has made the decision to leave.
7. The assembly of claim 6, wherein the chest of
the person who has made the decision to leave, is located on said persons.
8. The assembly of claim 1, wherein the
composition of said heart is only an opinion made by the person who has made
the decision to leave.
9. A method and apparatus of arrival, comprising:
an aircraft assembly unit containing
passenger seats for said person who has made the decision to leave; and/or
a motor vehicle containing a
seat for said person who has made the decision to leave;
fuel;
monetary value greater than or
equal to the cost of your heart;
the desire to arrive, consisting
of;
i) the act of coming
to or reaching a place;
ii) someone or
something that has come to a place; and
iii) the time
when something begins or happens.
10. The method of claim 9, wherein said aircraft
assembly unit abides by the terms required by aviation safety, specifically:
the theory, investigation, and categorization
of flight failures;
the prevention of such failures
through regulation, education, and training;
various campaigns to inform the
public as to the safety of air travel; and
the passenger who is standing in
the row adjusting their carry-ons after the captain has turned on the fasten
seat belt sign, and the passengers have been informed it is no longer safe to
move about the cabin, does not exist.
11. The method of claim 9, wherein said motor
vehicle, comprises:
a self-propelled wheeled vehicle
that does not operate on rails;
the vehicle propulsion is
provided by an engine or motor;
is identified within a number of
vehicle classes; and
the operator of said vehicle is
either the person who has made the decision to leave or is the person who was
convinced by the person who has made the decision to leave either by monetary,
sexual, neighborly, and the like, gestures.
12. The method of claim 9, wherein the type of
fuel is the preferred specialized type of petroleum-based fuel used to power an
aircraft.
13. The method of claim 9, wherein the monetary
value is on a scale of USD and heart strings, of which are equivalent to the
relation of the amount of heart strings that will deteriorate if a person does
not make the decision to leave.
14. The method of
claim 9, wherein the time when something begins or happens is relative to the
location of arrival, directly opposite from the location of departure.
15. The method of
claim 14, wherein said location is directly relative to the end result to the
decision made by the person to leave.
16. The method of
claim 14, wherein said location is directly relative to an infinite number of
results to the decision made by the person to leave.
To prepare for National Poetry Month, we have decided to partake in the Poet-to-Poet challenge. Though the guidelines specifically indicate the challenge is for grades 3-12, we can't miss an opportunity to be inspired. Rather than enter our poems (since we can't), we will post them here! More about the challenge here.
Visiting Lake Superior
Elyse Brownell
Return, again, to attend the ballet of Heliades across the blue-stained glass floor.
Walk along her shoreline, her softness pulled up around your toes as you sink into her body.
Feel the openness of her, an endless space, waiting beneath the curve of the Porcupine Mountains.
Rest, face her, watch the memories play back on reels of your father's fishing lines: late baths on warm summer nights; a plunge through her shell with the other polar bears; the Northern Lights (she welcomes them new again each time); her vacancy, after the fall, so many times.
Leave her as you found her, like an infinite lover you’ll always return to.
Directions to a Memory
Elyse Brownell
Return to the playground where someone threw rocks at your brother after he told them to leave you alone.
Leave the park, there, your brother, standing still holding another pointed rock in his palm.
Reach the top of the hill, just enough to see the boys standing still, like Risk pieces before the war began.
See your brother fall, like the wind knocked him over, as sudden as a picture frame falling down.
Run down the street, further away from water, though every direction you are standing closer.
Enter through the white screen door, calling to your mother, to hurry, to come see, to forget her purse, for now.
Can We Return? Elyse Brownell
She is waiting for you on the porch where you stood
kissing your first love.
Mother, I have come home again, so you can take
care of me, if but just for one week.
Lover, when I walk these streets I don’t think
of you, for the first time, since we met.
I am standing near the railroad where we crossed
the rails just months before the ink dried.
Silver spawn, flock to me, land on a branch,
nibble on some berries, I will be there soon.
Remember the playground where we were stuck for
hours? Remember the tether ball?
I still remember the way the icing tasted on my
pink ninja turtle cake after the goose hunt.
This year at the annual Frozen Dead Guy Days (FDGD), held in Nederland, CO, March 7-9, something new was offered: poetry. The idea for poetry was formed after a night of readings at the Very Nice Brewing Company’s Open Mic, when fellow-conspirators, Elyse Brownell and Chris Shugrue, us, we two crows, were approached by Amanda Macdonald, FDGD Event Coordinator. Macdonald was impressed by our original work and the energy we brought to the crowd and quickly offered us a spot on the bill at this year’s FDGD. We agreed, and the Frozen Dead Poets Society (FDPS) was born.
Though not a soapbox in sight, as the newspapers exclaimed there would be, we stood on 3 cinderblocks on First Street. On the first day, Saturday, we stood in the shadow of the Mountain People’s Co-op and competed with the Zimmerman’s (a local band that only covers Bob Dylan songs, fittingly) playing inside the Brain Freezer Tent. We had a list of 5 or 6 poets who offered to read from original poems or that of their favorite dead poet. Brownell beckoned to the people walking by:
Elyse Brownell
“We call to thee, dead poets, we call to thee upon this mountain, sing with us, poets, sing!”
Earlier in the day, to stir up the words, two ghosts haunted the town, handing out flyers to patrons at local bars: flyers of blue sheets with quotes from dead writers printed on them with the time and place in the bottom corner. Sometimes we mentioned what the flyers meant, other times walking mute, feeling nothing but the openness of the room and the curiosity. As the flyers floated down on table tops landing near someone’s hand, word was getting out: the poets were ready.
The wind picked up and more people started surrounding our cinderblock stage: the dead poets had arrived. The crowd was small but attentive, and their willingness to stand on the stage and call to the writers of the past was astonishing. We stood back for a moment and said to each other: “This is beautiful; this is what poetry should be about.”
Shugrue stood up there and read “Father Reason” by Rumi, a phrase from which he has tattooed on his right forearm: “Humble living does not diminish. It fills. Going back to a simpler self gives wisdom.” When he reached that part in the poem, he lifted his arm, pulled down his sleeve, and called to Rumi. The audience stood in awe at a man who believed so deeply in what he was reading, in what someone wrote, Rumi, that he had it etched into his skin for his daughter, for it is what comes after that is already within him: “When a father makes up a story for his child, he becomes a father and a child together, listening.” The audience stood together with him, listening, and together we all understood again the depth of our connections to each other.
Chris Shugrue
We ended the first day of FDPS with a young girl reading Shel Silverstein, after the loud hums of the crowd encouraged her to read it. It was a moment of pure innocence, reminding us that poetry should be the future; whether you write it or just stand up for it, poetry allows us to see the connections to our past, present, and future. Poetry sustains. What we witnessed reminded us again of the words of Anne Waldman: “Keep the world safe for poetry.”
On Sunday, just before 3PM, we decided to move the cinderblock stage further up First Street, in the sun, out in the open, and in the middle of the walkway, so there was no way to miss us. When forming FDPS, our primary mission was to bring poetry into a space where it would not be expected. In Nederland, and Colorado as a whole, poetry is very present, and while FDGD has something for everyone, what we felt was missing from the event was a performance space unique to poetry.
Before our final performance of the day, we sat at a picnic table at the Very Nice Brewing Company with piles of books by Kerouac, Rumi, Whitman, Lispector, Yeats, Ginsberg, Kabir, and Plath, the books that had been weighing down Shugrue’s backpack for days now. When asked what he was carrying on his back, Shugrue replied, “There’s thirty pounds of poetry in there.” When asked why we don’t get a Kindle, Brownell said, “You need to feel the weight of the poetry to truly appreciate it.”
We wrote exquisite corpses with the dead poets, taking turns to pick a quote and write on it, two notebooks switching back and forth between hands, mugs of beer, the banter of before-noon locals, and background music from string bands. It was an exercise in collaboration, but not just collaboration between two living writers in the present penning phrases over beers: by plucking phrases from the pages of past poets, we were conjuring the dead, summoning ghosts from thin mountain air and spinning their words into a present patchwork quilt that continued the thread of our own writing.
This was collaboration at its finest and most pure. Our collaboration with the poets of past was set, and we would use this piece to kick off the Sunday edition of the FDPS.
So yes, back to our cinderblock stage, 3 PM, the middle of First Street, Nederland, CO, with the wind howling straight down from snow covered Divide, we poets gathered again. In that gusting wind, we began the proceedings by reading our exquisite frozen corpse, with the ghost of ol’ Jack rising in air:
“I’d better be a poet
or lay down dead.”
We took turns reading from those two notebooks passed until all the ghosts were swirling about. With our incantations done, we turned the stage and the mountain over to the poets who came to share their words. What followed was one of the more inspiring events we’ve ever witnessed. Our position in the very middle of the street meant people could not pass without hearing songs fill the air, and the poets who took turns standing atop our cinderblock stage did not disappoint. The gathered were blessed with readings of original work, of the work of poets known and newly introduced, of mash-ups of poetical presence that left all smiling and laughing in a Rocky Mountain gale. A crowd of writers and witnesses in turn became one, and the wind kept roaring and shaped all the words bellowed into one grand poem sent singing down First Street. We all knew something new had been born.
Mark Curci
Phillip Bright
Sandra Erwin
Natalie Doerre
Matthew Clifford
James Steele
And finally, as the sun headed towards the Divide, Brownell finally stepped upon them blocks to finish off the first-ever meeting of the FDPS. And the ghost she decided to conjure, the words she decided to roar against wind, couldn’t have been more perfect. With the ghost of Walt Whitman dancing around her feet, she blew the assembly away with a reading of “On Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, the perfect ending to a perfect collaboration between poets alive and poets dead:
It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow,
I was refresh'd,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats,
I look'd.
Just like Whitman, we stood refreshed; we stood as one of
the crowd: our thirst quenched by
poetry, community, and good old-fashioned fun.
We stood as one as we ended our first meeting of the Frozen Dead
Poets. After all the words were spoken,
all the songs were sung, we realized something greater about this collaboration,
and the realization is humbling and equally inspiring in its simplicity: poetry never dies, and the poet who writes
doesn’t either. On a couple of beautiful
mountain days in March, a group of living performers communed with the words of
poets past. In this act, a new voice had
been created, and this new voice beckoned to the poetry of the future, and it
also called back to our collective pasts.
The dead poets conjured never die, for we are constantly in
collaboration with them. Words still
matter and poetry still has an important role in this world.
To all those who gathered with us: thank you. We couldn't have pulled this off without your presence and your words. In the end, we are all ghosts in search of words to make us whole.
-Elyse Brownell & Chris Shugrue
Tweet: @elysebrownell; @cpshugrue Bouldering Poets
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