Fleurs du Mal Magazine
Permanent Volta is a debut collection of love poems that resist subjection and asks how we might live together outside of capitalism, providing for each other through intimate acts of care and struggle.
In Permanent Volta are love poems about how queer intimacies invent political and poetic forms, how gender deviance imagines post-sovereign presents and futures.
Full of bad grammar, strange sonnets, and truncated sestinas, these poems are for anyone motivated by the homoerotic and intimate etymology of comrade: one who shares the same room.
If history sees writers as tops and muses as bottoms, these poems refuse, invert, and evade representation. Here, muses demand wages, then demand the world.
Rosie Stockton is a poet based in Los Angeles. Their first book, Permanent Volta, is the recipient of the 2019 Sawtooth Prize, and is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2021. Their poems have been published by Publication Studio, VOLT, Jubilat, Apogee, Mask Magazine, and WONDER. They are currently a Ph.D. Student in Gender Studies at UCLA.
Review: “Stockton, who is from New Mexico, is releasing their debut book, Permanent Volta, about gender, sexuality, and love this week. It is a lush collection of poetry about the possibilities of love outside capitalism, and love as a way to resist its abuses. The poems are exceedingly relevant to our uneasy time: about hating work and being broke, but also about being in love, and needing sex, luxury, and care.”
ROSIE STOCKTON: The contradiction posed in the title is one of the main questions I was writing through in this book. As you say, if the turn is “permanent,” it exists in motion, in a constant state of becoming. I was interested in constant becoming in relation to form. Usually sonnets only have one volta, followed by some semblance of resolution in the couplet. How could a “permanent volta” refuse this resolution? I might even distill this poetic question into a familiar political question around reform or revolution: what does change look like within a given structure vs. what does it look like to change that structure? Like so many poets since the 13th century, I took the sonnet as the structure I wanted to sabotage, slow down, hustle, edge, and flood as a way to ask this question.
Poetry
Permanent Volta
Rosie Stockton
ISBN: 9781643620756
Paperback
120 pages
Published: May 18, 2021
Publisher Nightboat Books
$16.95
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More in: - Book News, Archive S-T, Archive S-T, LGBT+ (lhbt+)
A Funeral Thought
I
When the stern Genius, to whose hollow tramp
Echo the startled chambers of the soul.
Waves his inverted torch o’er that pale camp
Where the archangel’s final trumpets roll,
I would not meet him in the chamber dim,
Hushed, and pervaded with a name-less fear,
When the breath flutters and the senses swim,
And the dread hour is near.
II
Though Love’s dear arms might clasp me fondly then
As if to keep the Summoner at bay,
And woman’s woe and the calm grief of men
Hallow at last the chill, unbreathing clay —
These are Earth’s fetters, and the soul would shrink,
Thus bound, from Darkness and the dread Unknown,
Stretching its arms from Death’s eternal brink,
Which it must dare alone.
III
But in the awful silence of the sky,
Upon some mountain summit, yet untrod,
Through the blue ether would I climb, to die
Afar from mortals and alone with God!
To the pure keeping of the stainless air
Would I resign my faint and fluttering breath,
And with the rapture of an answered prayer
Receive the kiss of Death.
IV
Then to the elements my frame would turn;
No worms should riot on my coffined clay,
But the cold limbs, from that sepulchral urn,
In the slow storms of ages waste away.
Loud winds and thunder’s diapason high
Should be my requiem through the coming time,
And the white summit, fading in the sky,
My monument sublime.
Bayard Taylor
(1825 – 1878)
A Funeral Thought
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More in: Archive S-T, Archive S-T, Het graf van de lezer, Tales of Mystery & Imagination, Western Fiction
This week, the Ministry of Justice in Belarus sent a letter indicating they are seeking to liquidate our sister organization PEN Belarus, which for years has supported writers and free expression in the country. It comes as the country’s authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenka continues to crack down on all those who dissent. Show our colleagues and friends at PEN Belarus that they are not alone—and that we rally to support the freedom to write wherever and whenever it comes under threat.
Please join us and take action
Click here:
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Show your support for PEN Belarus.
Thank You!
PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. They champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Their mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.
Founded in 1922, PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network. PEN America works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others.
More information on PEN America, click here
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Fugitive
Nous sommes étrangers et passons sur la terre
Comme un esquif léger qui fuit en se jouant
Sous les furtifs baisers d’une brise légère,
Et dans l’horizon bleu disparaît lentement ;
Heureux si le sillon qu’il marque dans sa fuite
Demeure quelque temps après qu’il a passé ;
Si quelque tourbillon n’efface tout de suite
Le chemin qu’en son cours rapide il a tracé ;
Heureux si, dans les lieux d’où le sort nous entraîne,
Il nous demeure un cœur où nous vivions encor,
Un seul cœur qui nous suive en la plage lointaine
Que l’on nomme ici-bas le sépulcre d’un mort.
Octobre 1879
Alice De Chambrier
(1861-1882)
Fugitive
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More in: Alice De Chambrier, Archive C-D, Archive C-D
O KIND’REN
VAN MIJN DROOMEN
O kind’ren van mijn droomen,
O bloemkens van mijn tuin,
Wat buigt ge droef en loome
Uw teng’re kopkens schuin…
Ge waart zo frisch te voren
Als klokskens van de Mei,
O lievekens, geboren
Uit droom en mijmerij…
En ‘k heb u, stil-bewogen,
Gevoed, bij nacht en dag,
Met regen van mijn oogen,
Met zonne van mijn lach.
Ik wil u niet zien welken;
Ge moet herleven nog.
O liefde…, warm die kelken,
O zonne…, zoen ze toch,
En koester, lieve, goede
Mijn zielekind’ren weêr;
Ik kan ze niet meer voeden:
‘k Heb geen illuzies meer.
Alice Nahon
(1896-1933)
O Kind’ren van mijn Droomen
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More in: Archive M-N, Archive M-N, Nahon, Alice
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