Knot - Hardcover

Gander, Forrest

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556596715 ISBN 13: 9781556596711

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2022

Synopsis

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Forrest Gander responds to the provocative photographs of Jack Shear.

The elements are timeless and fundamental—a male nude and a piece of black linen—and the photographic results are miraculous. Within Knot are twenty-three lush black and white photographs of a body and cloth performing a provocative ballet, a wrestling match, a tense sequence of appearances and disappearances that immediately take on symbolic weight. When poet Forrest Gander first encountered these images, he asked Jack Shear for more. As Gander recalls, the photographs arrived “dreamy, violent, mythic, and elemental… I set them up around the room and knew I wanted to write my way into them." The result is a profound dialogue between word and image, observation and inspiration, imagination and intellect. “What do you see?" one poem asks. "A divinity wrung from a black cloud."

About this title

About the Authors

Forrest Gander is a cross-genre writer and translator and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the poetry book Be With (New Directions, 2019). He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and PEN America. A former professor at Brown University, Gander currently lives in California.

Jack Shear has worked as a photographer for over twenty-five years and is noted for his iconic portraits of American figures such as William S. Burroughs and Ellsworth Kelly, as well as architectural photography. He has exhibited his photographs in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Shear also serves as the executive director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Exhausted. I can't climb anymore…

Exhausted. I can't climb anymore. Yet I could, possibly, hang here for a moment, stop

this exertion, just cling, catching my breath, to this cascade of long dark hair which

she has let down from the window. The window that didn't look nearly so high, only

balcony level wasn't it?, when I started. Those hours ago. Haven't I been climbing for

hours? Above me, my overextended arms quiver and ache all the way down to their

sockets, the round swollen muscles of my shoulders press to my ears. Is she calling?

I can't hear. When I look up, I see the cascade of her long hair, nothing beyond that.

But it's as difficult to pause as to climb, so I keep going. To tell the truth, I never

paused. Deaf and blind, I keep tugging myself up into that falling blackness. I who

am bringing her the moon.

As long as I hold this up…

As long as I hold this up, you cannot see me, you don't know who or what I am or

why the cloth's weave has no luster, no pilling, no shading. I am almost invisible.

And when finally my hand trails the rest of me inside, where only enough room

remains, exactly enough room, for that single hand, the one still lifted above my head

holding the cloth, the I which used to be me will have disappeared completely, and

the material will no doubt tumble to the floor as though there never were anything

inside it, nothing filling it out. Or just a capricious spirit. Or just a fleet intimation of

form. What was that, anyway? Don't tell me it was a life. Just my wrist, my thumb, my

curled fingers. They constitute all that remains. A green glow at the ocean's horizon

after the sun has gone down. Something like that. Already not even something really,

only a particle of something attached to what merely seemed substantial but was,

instead, the nothing. To which I am subject. To which I granted so much scope, it

crowded me out and I became my own ghost. But inside the darkness. Inside the. In.

What are you holding so tightly…

What are you holding so tightly?

You can see it's a corpse.

But where are you taking it?

It goes where I go.

Aren't you far ahead of the funeral procession?

It's a private affair.

Meaning it's someone you loved?

Someone I would have loved to see

make better choices.

In time, things will get better for you.

You don't know that. What's

to come is just

the sentence of my duration.

You don't think feelings can change?

If time were some sort of measurement

of change, it stopped for me.

Say what you will, don't you still have the present

and your own choices to make?

You think that between the past and the future

there's an interval in which I'm

considering your question. But there is no interval.

You don't believe in the present?

My future is what I carry my corpse into.

When finally I let go of my self-pity…

When finally I let go of my self-pity, when

I sloughed off the garment of my grief

hoisting it furiously over my head,

I discovered myself

wondering what would come next.

But it's you, isn't it?

You've caught me unsleeved. Washed

clean, a bud after rain. And it's clear

to you that my body isn't only the shaft

of an archaic instrument. It's a communion

you want to share. With my eyes covered

of course, you're free to take me in. But

wouldn't you like even more? Can

you sate yourself on just my vitality, my

pure form? I've already entered

your experience sensorially, not

as mere information. And however much you stare,

I stand beyond any place where your command,

your flirting, your feigned closeness reaches.

As the seen thing, I'm immutable and still

worth your attending to. And it could be

I'll let you go further if you give me a hand

lifting this last blindness from my face.

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556596715
• ISBN 13: 9781556596711
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 72