Carrie Etter
Poem for Two Voices (1)
This is the normative
not I
talking about a mode
of being?
I hadn’t thought of that
which is to say
Did you see clouds scrape the spires?
mice in the fields
Live near cornfields, you want cats
normative is not
I never thought of myself as normal
or normative
Insignificance can’t be normative
you would say
Cultivate beauty
like the young
Oh with them it just happens
leopard print
ageless
youth
ageless
normative
leopard print
normative
common
ordinary
ordinary
you would say
talking about a mode
sshhh
I’m cultivating beauty
naïve
I’m cultivating beauty
would that you were
shut up
we’re not getting closer
it would be too easy
to ask what’s normal
it would be too easy
complacency
normative
sacred
incandescent
yet recognizable
incandescent
I’m not redefining
cultivated
normative
I know that tune
Poem for Two Voices (2)
I began in depth
where’s the paddling pool?
nuanced by contrast
making a handle
every time I retold the story
meaning keeps moving
colours grew sharper or changed
sometimes edging beyond the visible
upending the usual connotations
the story’s colouring
creating new enigmas
had something to say
over and over again
a matter of habit
of circumstances
of need or a hunger for
the retelling
palimpsest
until I can’t recall the original
if there is such a thing
palimpsest, the traces of erasure
an awkward transition, a
the unconscious decision
a kind of frame
in the starting point
feeling apologetic
once upon a life
for all thus lost
not that story
invented her own Golden Age
the stealth of recognition
in the retelling
what is depth?
the colour of
ambiguous all the same
American expatriate Carrie Etter is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Her first collection, The Tethers (Seren, 2009), won the London Festival Fringe New Poetry Award for the best first collection published in the UK and Ireland in the past year, and her second collection, Divining for Starters, will be published by Shearsman Books in February 2011; these poems are included there. She has also edited an anthology, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010).