Discipline: Literature – poetry

G.C. Waldrep

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: Lewisburg, PA
MacDowell Fellowships: 2001, 2006, 2012, 2015

Fox-Breath (Para-Chantry)

by G.C. Waldrep

It would be rank. It would be

mute, & then immutable.

You would not be able to hide

inside it. No language

but misprision, the concept of.

The squalor of it, a poverty

of music unstrung

from the body of intention

with a sailor’s knife,

the blade of it a cheek against

some other, crystal cheek.

And you would long

for it, to be delivered from it.

It would not harm you—

not on its own terms,

for its own muscular sake.

You would be as a spirit to it,

an object of devotion.

Feel it caress your flank, the

thin tissues of flesh garlanding

your throat. While you lie

prone in a forest glade.

Your condition is irrelevant

the way the sky, suspended

above the dew-struck

canopy, is irrelevant: a pure

song, a dropped stitch.

The thread entering & then

leaving your body, gold needle

tightening in the dream’s

grasp. You would die for this,

is what you are thinking—

Quisling, Magdalene, lictor—

wanting to draw

that close to some living well.

--originally published in The Kenyon Review

Fox-Breath (Para-Chantry)

Wild Turkeys on Sunday

by G.C. Waldrep

arrested, field-in-hythe

a queue forms,

vision is licensed

against its greater mesh

o severed hand

o chaste emperor, skein

precision is not,

as some claim, a virtue

oxygen’s axis mundi

evolves

a cartographer’s

salt (breathe it gently)

what you see is

biology’s nation-state,

resentment’s plait

gun-metal in half-light

this piercèd will

wives a tithing flesh

the eye’s mullion’s

vivisecting

lending bank, a business

semaphore-seiche

my hive-body

(so ignorantly aflame)

--originally appeared in The Kenyon Review; written at MacDowell, August 2012

Wild Turkeys on Sunday
American Goshawk - Tap to read
American Goshawk - Tap to read

G.C. Waldrep is the author most recently of the collection feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the 2019 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a long poem, Testament (BOA Editions, 2015). Waldrep’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, Paris Review, New England Review, New American Writing, Harper’s, Tin House, Conjunctions, and many other journals in the USA and abroad, as well as in the Best American Poetry anthology series and the second edition of Norton’s Postmodern American Poetry. With Ilya Kaminsky he co-edited Homage to Paul Celan (Marick, 2011) and with Joshua Corey he co-edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta, 2012). Waldrep’s work has received prizes from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets as well as the Colorado Prize, the Dorset Prize, the Campbell Corner Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing, and a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. He teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch. From 2007 to 2018 he served as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

Studios

Irving Fine

G.C. Waldrep worked in the Irving Fine studio.

Youngstown Studio was given to MacDowell by friends of Miss Myra McKeown in Youngstown, OH, where she promoted both art and music. It was renamed Irving Fine Studio in 1972 in honor of Irving Fine, a distinguished composer, conductor, and teacher who was a MacDowell Fellow during the 1940s and 1950s. The simple interior of the studio…

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