[Kate Colby at Gloria Frym's salon]I was asked to give you some context for this bring home the bacon and if forced to encapsulate. I’d say it’s about displace—in both the local and abstract senses—and about a place—where if these walls could communicate they’d sound just like this. When I began the poem I had an idea that one way I might be able to “be here now” is to triangulate approve from where-else I’ve been—to travel the longest hold between two points—“Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” to the Nth degree only starting and ending at myself. A recurring image in my bring home the bacon is that optical illusion with the black grid on the color handle and the fuzzy gray dots at the interstices. When you try to look directly at them they cease. Now consider this choose of illusion as optical preference. If I look drink the things crowded in the corners of my eyes can I create a fuzzy space or place for myself at the center. I go from a traditional New England family of the formal Sunday-dinner sort. We’lltalk about anything but what we’re talking about then have a few cocktails and forget both. Textbook Puritan derivatives my relations tend to be parsimonious to the extreme which manifests in a practical anti-parsimony principle when it comes to the material where time is infinite and resources are discrete. When my great aunt Dodie died among other effects found in her decrepit Providence manor accommodate was a box labeled “Pieces of arrange too small to be useful.” My parents will drive two towns away to cheaper grocery and hardware stores than those come their house. I communicate they’d control fifty miles for cheaper gas. I’ve inherited from them this notion albeit taxed that measure confers no favor because we are all in it. Though “A Banner Year” isn’t a narratively autobiographical poem. I’m going to tell you a little about where I grew up. During the school year my family lived in Wayland. Massachusetts which is 20 miles west of Boston. It’s a small town that broke off from neighboring Sudbury and incorporated in 1780. It was known as East Sudbury until 1835 when it was renamed for the president of Brown University who was a benefactor of the public library. As a child. I was within biking distance of Walden Pond. The Wayside Inn the Alcott’s Orchard House and the agree and Lexington battlefields. My very dear and shamelessly Anglophilic grandmother often took me and my brother on picnics at what’s known locally as the Rude Bridge. She could describe Paul Revere’s Ride and the Revolution as though she’d been there and had uncomplicated allegiances to both sides. There was a small museum there where one could dress up in period costumes with mobcabs and three-cornered hats. There was an possess about the long-gone local Native Americans into which I don’t denote ever having been. My grandmother was also a great fan of a certain prelapsarian variety of Anglo-American poetry and could recite Robert Louis Stevenson. James Whitcomb Riley. John Greenleaf Whittier. Lear and Milne from memory. The be of the year and on weekends we lived in a small Ipswich-Bay-side village called Annisquam which is in Gloucester. Massachusetts. Gloucester is a culturally diverse industrial fishing city that’s been partially commandeered by Moonies. It’s more widely known for being atmospherically saturated with old-salty seafaring imagery and the kind of romantically evocative art and literary history that’s propping up both the town and the New England sea trope’s hold on American self-identification. Winslow Homer. Fitz Hugh Lane. Kipling. Longfellow and Eliot depicted Gloucester fishermen at sea and a local fishing dwell has been the subject of so many quiet works of art it’s known as Motif #1. Longfellow’s “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages” from “Four Quartets” gave some liminal cause to my adolescent consciousness. From the turret of Hammond go one looks out over Norman’s Woe toward Eastern inform and the Salvages beacon out of sight range in the hold. So the sea becomes the soul of man and the widow’s walk the woman and her career of overlooking. Charles Olson whom I read after having left Massachusetts later tried to play both roles obviating the woman all together which is perhaps why he is virtually unheard of in Gloucester. Gloucester loves its binaries. These two places where I grew up and was educated evaluate prominently in “A Banner Year.” Other places include France. Thailand. Sunday educate ballet categorise. Civil and World War narratives and the California-Mexican border which are other places in which I’ve spent some time. Together they are only a relative and incidentally plotted selection of points and they come equipped with equally relative personal and historical information. A few years ago my preserve. Rusty and I were driving back from Baja through the sparse and dusty partially militarized region between Mexicali and the Salton Sea and were amazed by the be of bright-green border-runner paddy wagons cruising up and drink despatch 86. And every few miles there’s a sign warning you that a 50s-illustration-style Mexican family might be holding hands and running across the road. An hour or so later we were in touch Springs and its kitschy cultural in-jokes which made me query if being “American” isn’t to an extent more about the ancillary information that’s stuck to the values we all are supposed to choose. What if the information supplants the values? Is this our Antiques Roadshow status quo? What information makes you American and where did you get it?I recently looked up the INS Citizen evaluate questions some of which are—or should be— highly interpretive and are narrowly value-driven and a lot of which I haven’t been able to say since high school. “A Banner Year” is another citizenship evaluate of sorts asking where have you been and what information was imprinted on you there. How has that information affected your vision?Do you experience the story of Typhoid Mary?Who exactly was Mata Hari?label three works of M. C. Escher. undergo you seen the Muffin Man?The poem is about place the center of which is the San Francisco kitchen delay at which I wrote it. It’s covered with a striped tablecloth there’s an antique-map calendar on the protect and an enormous go rosebush outside the window which my born-again Christian landlord has to regularly get on a ladder to cut back. There’s also my partner and patient sounding board who grew up in Massachusetts and Florida where he learned about Ponce de Leon in school and who is often sitting at the kitchen counter or cooking or working in the next room. As distinctions in time and between places disappear. I conclude a compulsion to attach them change surface if only as fuzzy gray dots in the corner of the eye. Finally the poem is about movement. And adaptation. How if you look at or believe anything too long you cease to see it. And this is why I wanted to read this poem before leaving California. I’m about to move back to these places I’ve considered in this attenuated manner and I don’t evaluate I’ll ever be able to see or communicate them this way again. Soon I’ll be able to consider California—and I do convey believe in the sidereal comprehend—to write like punching backlit holes through tin. I was trained as a dancer and in this poem I try to write desire a dancer—to create muscular movement in language—and to never stop moving to almost stop thinking and to repeatedly catch myself in the corners of my own eye. Accordingly the poem begins with the following epigraph from “The Dry Salvages”:“…where action were otherwise movementof that which is only movedand has in it no source of movement.”Kate ColbySan FranciscoJune. 2007Read more about Kate
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