Marcella Durand is the author of City of Ports (Situations Press), the Program Coordinator for the Poetry Project, and the poetry editor for Erato Press. She has collaborated on prints, broadsides, and sculptures with artists Richard O’Russa and Karoline Schleh. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 6ix, Outlet, Chain, Skanky Possum, and Situation.
Working Notes
Machine into water simultaneously alchemical and chemical: chemical in juxtaposing two elements, machinery and water, & playing with contrast of texture and structure. Machinery artificial, conceived, awkward, practical, vulnerable, controlling, fragmented, fragmenting. Water primal, solvent, overlapping, pervasive, reflective. Poems then written repetitively, refractively, but with construction, structures, gears. Alchemical also reflecting intent, something appearing out of nothing, elements transforming, idea of transformation. Hoping for sympathetic magic in poems, written with intention to cast words against encroaching ecological destruction. The act of printing and its historical association with alchemy a very important element: words appearing on blank page, but also became interested in words laying on top of page, like oil slick, having nothing to do with shape of page or texture of paper, but only involved in their own grinding structure. The lack of interaction at times gave impetus for other interactions--the machine can interact with water? Will be water?
machine into water 12
within the riveted machine blocks
a loose screw, a tiny trivet
ready to receive the hot dish, the
ample wish, the building deconstructed,
a demolishment of windows or sheer
glass archways, arcades of iron wound
about and about in braids of lateral
stress. Ready to support the steaming
entrails, the corporate need, the CEO
with complicated desires, the manliness
and the glass ceilings. The translucency
and the economy. The benefits and the
tax dollars. The columns bend and sway
in response to cross-quarterly winds off
the flatness of the lands. A few degrees
lower, the metal shears, to the coldness
of the heart, when mixed with numbers
in a dish of mathematics and upward
trends, blood surrounds addition in a
stew of heavy elements. Heavier in a
mine, or quarry, or this building being
demolished, a deconstruction of ether,
of memory, of placement in sensitivity
to other buildings, a stepping down of
heights, a human-scale endeavor.
machine into water 13
striated do the columns
gessoed make
in winds of tear & stress
do they wander in cold and dropping
the tensed springs & coils
of these columns make
inherent do their materials
turn within and off
then reopen in weather
signals these columns do stand
and wither like weeds.