Candace Pirnak lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. She received her Bachelor's degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her MFA from Brown University. Her work has previously appeared in The Germ.
Working Notes
These poems were written in a spirit of inquisitiveness and admiration. I had been reading Eigner and was trying to understand his use of space and object on the page, what it is that his poems do, and how they do it. "From Themselves" responds to both his poetry and his writings on poetry. Similarly, "a narrative" draws as much from Jandl's explication of his "erschaffung der eva" as from his poem, itself an amazing poem, I think, yet one I felt needed a rebuttal, however mild, to the patriarchal infrastructure upon which his poem is built.
a narrative
--after Jandl
only the e retains a
certain hardiness as in
" herself
purloined from the sub-vernacular
the a disappearing by descent
vertically
downward;
alphabetically becoming
the first moving matter
living through the letter
which issues from the mouth
ribbed,
the central o
forming as if
" above
From Themselves
--for Larry Eigner
from themselves,
object to object
---soto voce:
big B was beginning
( left margin ) all speech
( immaculate ) more or less
hindsight:
" getting the distance to conform
as spoken "
----laced close ( fitting
sudden
perception )
until there is, mid-air
an immediate said
---of herself and trees
memorized as,
as everything is
drawn against-------