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    Scaffolding: Poems
    Scaffolding: Poems
    Scaffolding: Poems
    Ebook97 pages37 minutes

    Scaffolding: Poems

    By Eléna Rivera

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    About this ebook

    A remarkable sequence of sonnets that reflect contemporary daily life in New York City

    Scaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, Eléna Rivera uses the English sonnet as a scaffold to explore daily events, observations, conversations, thoughts, words, and memories—and to reflect on the work of earlier poets and the relationship between life and literature.

    Guided by formal and syllabic constraints, the poems become in part an exploration of how form affects content and how other poets have approached the sonnet. The poems, which are very attentive to rhythm and sound, are often in conversation with historical, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources. But at the same time they engage directly with the present moment. Like the construction scaffolding that year after year goes up around buildings all over New York, these poems build on one another and change the way we see what was there before.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateOct 3, 2016
    ISBN9781400883387
    Scaffolding: Poems
    Author

    Eléna Rivera

    Eléna Rivera is a poet and translator. She is the author of The Perforated Map and Unknowne Land, and her poems have appeared in the Nation, Denver Quarterly, the New York Times, and many other publications. Her translation of Bernard Noël's The Rest of the Voyage won the Robert Fagles Translation Prize. She was born in Mexico City, spent her childhood in Paris, and now lives in New York City.

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      Book preview

      Scaffolding - Eléna Rivera

      SCAFFOLDING

      JULY 14TH FROM 80 LA SALLE

      Dawn in the city, windows wide open—wham!

      Slam! Screams! Now scaffolding confronts this hometown—

      trash smashed, strollers, birds, doors opening/closing

      Here happens, all day, tending to tones sounding

      in our ears—Beep! Vehicle backs into street

      veers round the corner—listen, take note of this

      city waking, summer moistened with sirens,

      syncopated noise—beats anticipate stress

      as skyscrapers vibrate—All’s well, you say, "All’s

      Here"—a car idles, shakes, feeds the vertigo—

      water the balcony’s garden, hear children,

      hear the blaring radio counterpoint to

      the modest breeze this morning—back inside then,

      at the desk, the sawed railings of the poem

      JULY 30TH

      The dictionary the eye the ear our lungs

      open, engender owl here genesis there

      Turn the page and all things come alive echo

      in the imagination—the word leads us

      into worlds into time into reverie—

      And the real? what happens to reality?

      No need for Derrida, the deconstruction

      already part of the city’s laws where we

      live leave everything to measure re-measure

      Construction and destruction, bricks are replaced

      Without answers without frame the scaffolding

      highlights the slab the bricks the mortar playpen,

      not just whispers but its cinder block questions

      From drill to hammer to threshold to discourse

      JULY 31ST SHELL-WORDS

      I put you together, fall in with the past,

      return to fading atmospheres no matter

      the pillars, columns, moments evaporate

      Mourn the loss of light poet you wrote of this

      not a new notion we look back always look

      the woman tripped, fell, her head hitting concrete,

      shocked by the body that aging monument

      One page faces another where poets look

      at shadows, illuminate the present place

      The multitude must be in the words, allude

      to the boundless past that sentence that binds us

      crashes into liberty’s baffling riddle

      Boulders, ocean, and the old obscurity

      What happened to them, us, writing in water?

      AUG. 5TH

      When a man is asked to sing of his anger

      the risk is that without remorse virtue

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