Chase Twichell
Chase Twichell Poems
Don't tell me we're not like plants,
sending out a shoot when we need to,
or spikes, poisonous oils, or flowers.
...
Whenever I look
out at the snowy
mountains at this hour
and speak directly
...
Sometimes I long to be in the woodpile,
cut-apart trees soon to be smoke,
or even the smoke itself,
...
I fired up the mower
although it was about to rain--
a chill late September afternoon,
wild flowers re-seeding themselves
...
The father is teaching his eight-year old
to clean a grouse, the purple-gray skin
pimpled by plucking,
...
Two aides get Dad in the car
on the second try.
He meddles with his seat belt,
...
Ice on the puddles,
in the cups of fallen leaves.
I'd walk with Dad and a handful
...
I know I promised to stop
talking about her,
but I was talking to myself.
...
What etiquette holds us back
from more intimate speech,
especially now, at the end of the world?
...
I like to think about the monastery
as I'm falling asleep, so that it comes
and goes in my mind like a screen saver.
...
The mower flipped it belly up,
a baby garter less than a foot long,
dull green with a single sharp
...
I want you with me, and yet you are the end
of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms
have become public? How we glance to see if--
who? Who did you imagine?
...
A kid said you could chew road tar
if you got it before it cooled,
black globule with a just-forming skin.
He said it was better than cigarettes.
...
Whenever I touch the cairn
marking the summit
of one of my parents,
...
On the first warm day,
the aides fret about his pate,
fetch his hat. I push him
...
After my father's cremation,
my sisters and I agreed
to bury him privately
...
The noise throws down
twin shadows, hunting shadows
on a black joy ride.
...
The first night at the monastery,
a moth lit on my sleeve by firelight,
long after the first frost.
...
Above the blond prairies,
the sky is all color and water.
The future moves
from one part to another.
...
When fed into the crude, imaginary
machine we call the memory,
the brain's hard pictures
...
Chase Twichell Biography
Chase Twichell (born August 20, 1950) is an American poet, professor, and publisher, the founder in 1999, of Ausable Press. Her most recent poetry collection is Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been, which earned her Claremont Graduate University's prestigious $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. (Copper Canyon Press, 2010).She is the winner of several awards in writing from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and The Artists Foundation. Additionally, she has received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Field, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and The Yale Review. Many of Twichell's poems are heavily influenced by her years as a Zen Buddhist student of John Daido Loori at Zen Mountain Monastery, and her poetry in the book The Snow Watcher shows it. She attended the Foote School in New Haven. In the Fall 2003 Tricycle magazine interview with Chase, she says, "Zazen and poetry are both studies of the mind. I find the internal pressure exerted by emotion and by a koan to be similar in surprising and unpredictable ways. Zen is a wonderful sieve through which to pour a poem. It strains out whatever's inessential." Twichell was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and earned her B.A. from Trinity College and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She lives in New York with her husband, novelist Russell Banks. She has taught at Princeton University, Warren Wilson College, Goddard College, University of Alabama, and Hampshire College. Twichell was a judge for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize.)
The Best Poem Of Chase Twichell
Erotic Energy
Don't tell me we're not like plants,
sending out a shoot when we need to,
or spikes, poisonous oils, or flowers.
Come to me but only when I say,
that's how plants announce
the rules of propagation.
Even children know this. You can
see them imitating all the moves
with their bright plastic toys.
So that, years later, at the moment
the girl's body finally says yes
to the end of childhood,
a green pail with an orange shovel
will appear in her mind like a tropical
blossom she has never seen before.
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4/20/2024 6:15:55 AM # 1.0.0.1119
I found you by accident on U Tube. The poem about the Fairground. Powerful stuff. I like the poems I've read here too, I will search for more. THANK YOU.