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    Bye-Bye Land
    Bye-Bye Land
    Bye-Bye Land
    Ebook132 pages54 minutes

    Bye-Bye Land

    By Christian Barter

    ()

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    About this ebook

  • In 2016, Barter was named Acadia National Park's first-ever Poet Laureate, in honor of the park's Centennial year.

  • Barter has been honored with many prestigious awards and accolades, including the Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions; the 2014 Maine Literary Award for the year’s best book of poetry published in Maine; a 2010 residency fellowship at The McDowell Colony; a 2009 residency fellowship at Yaddo; a 2008-2009 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University; finalist for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Prize; and finalist for the 2005 Independent Publishers’ Book of the Year.

  • Barter's poetic voice, with allusive monologues and rich lyricism undercut by deep skepticism, can be likened to such modernist luminaries as T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell, Michael Broek, and Frank Bidart. His long monologues and the ways in which his speakers talk can, at times, feel utterly outside of poetry.

  • This collection borrows heavily from Eliot’s methods in The Wasteland, particularly the way he mixes voices, contrasting high and low diction throughout.

  • There is something ironically refreshing about Barter's preference for modern fundamentals versus contemporary, that his work shows more influence by Lowell, Eliot, and Frost than, say, Sharon Olds and Terrance Hayes. Barter's work is deeply reminiscent of our poetic predecessors.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateMay 22, 2017
    ISBN9781942683360
    Bye-Bye Land

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      Book preview

      Bye-Bye Land - Christian Barter

      1

      The Warm Land

      "One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work

      tells all."

      —Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

      A full moon hanging in the last part of the night,

      a few crickets grinding it out a little longer,

      their inner workings will not let them stop,

      rhythm like a train climbing,

      rhythm like a hammer,

      a laundromat chorus of washing machines,

      a mechanized loom threshing out the soft yarn

      And the first cars in the distance humming

      through New Jersey towards New York or Philly,

      a pedal tone for some modal chant

      that hasn’t yet begun

      And the moon, its plains and craters

      bright and sharp, even from this distance,

      especially from this distance,

      silent partner

      unchanged by all this commotion,

      its silence unbroken by an early jet passing,

      unchanged from the time of single cells, dividing,

      to the creatures who can gaze at it now,

      the fires always burning on their plains,

      who have found the fire of the sun inside a rock.

      Inside the house, the lights come on.

      The man sits up, stares at the floor.

      The woman covers her eyes with a blanket.

      Did you sleep all right?

      But there is only the sound of running water.

      I dreamt again of the ships, the tall ships

      Don’t forget to take the garbage to the curb.

      And call Visa about that overcharge, will you?

      And we need to stop by the ShopRite—we’re out of milk.

      And don’t forget the tank’s about on empty.

      Forget not yet the tried intent

      Of such a truth as I have meant¹

      In the last part of the night

      when the night is an ink spilled into water

      and the things of this world have not yet made it back

      from being skyline

      ¹ Thomas Wyatt, Forget Not Yet.

      Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples,²

      steel U-Store-Its, smokestacks, Golden Arches,

      landfill mountains, gas-station islands

      have not yet made it back from being skyline,

      from being one line,

      from being settled on the murky bottom

      for divers’ salvages, arriving alone,

      the bus driver thrumming at his vinyl helm,

      the new guy getting to the office early,

      the halls one off the other, rooms

      waiting for something, waiting

      with an attitude you must catch them off guard to see—

      Arriving alone, the fast-food manager,

      the rows of plastic seats an empty chapel

      White cereals in the whites of kitchens,

      white bread, white noise of televisions

      It’s morning again in America.³

      Fears of impending global financial crisis

      The threat of terror

      First of all, sir, the President has said

      we are not going to engage in torture under any circumstances⁴

      And the Philadelphia Phillies

      have won the first of a possible seven games.

      ² Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie / Open unto the fields, and to the sky, William Wordsworth, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.

      ³ Ronald Reagan, campaign slogan of 1984.

      ⁴ Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General confirmation hearing before Congress, January 6, 2005.

      History is theirs and the people make it⁵

      and tree to tree the starlings flit

      and glide and fritter away the only hour

      of the dawn—trees clenched,

      trees heated and bent and doused in the cold water

      of the day, the sky

      a pale blue neither far nor near—

      the sky that was over the Peloponnesians

      sailing at Greece, the Etruscans

      firing themselves on dishes to be smashed

      by the Romans’ thousand-year tantrum, the sky

      they saw through the smoke of the ships at Veracruz,

      the sky that absorbed the flag over Iwo Jima.

      I guess everybody just trying to, ah,

      pick up their game, you know?

      And do everything we usually do,

      just that much more harder and, you know,

      that much more better.⁶

      And what would the dogs do?

      ⁵ History is ours and the people make it, Salvador Allende.

      ⁶ from an interview with Eddie House, Boston Celtic, after a game in 2008.

      The dog would hold on to my clothes and bite me.

      Where did they bite you?

      If they would let the dogs go they would definitely bite us.

      When you got to Guantanamo what happened?

      I could not see anything or hear anything,

      and I was like that for about two weeks.⁷

      And the trees that look too thick to cross,

      the trees that flank the interstate,

      the trees along a field’s far edge,

      their vines and branches clinging into clouds

      the way the atom’s forces draw

      its spinnings into matter,

      the engine noise and deadened barking

      suspended in the trees themselves,

      as though already memory:

      of boys with basketballs and dogs

      incensed by cars and muffled back doors

      closing

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