03 May FUTURE IMPERFECT by Elizabeth Willis
I had to stop writing in order to clean my desk.
I had to stop writing to speak with the angel of dust.
The card I pulled was strength not speed.
Something in the body reaches for something outside it.
I’m looking for the wave that rises like a wall. Reaching for
Octavia Butler’s prophecies, not science, not fiction but the
capacity for thought beyond narrative event and recorded fact.
A field can think about what a feeling knows.
Parables are tools of directed attention. One part moves around
outside you, the other circumnavigates your blood. A story
reading you as you read it.
Where does it—the It that is also you—come to rest?
What risks do you feel at the threshold, where do you place the
fear that you won’t come back from wherever it’s taking you, the
It that is thought.
I’m watching a serrated line move across a map. The sound of a
finger pointing away from what it’s done.
I’m listening for the bell, for the machine to stop, dishes in the
kitchen, the sound of a person I love, my system crashing as the
sprung door bangs shut.
About the Poet
Elizabeth Willis is the author of Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024), a hybrid work engaged with American belief and relationship structures, theatre, activism, and film. Her other books of poetry include Alive (New York Review Books, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Address; Meteoric Flowers; Turneresque; The Human Abstract; and the artist’s book Spectral Evidence. She also writes about the intersection of art and labor and edited the volume Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
This poem appears in Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024).
Related Event
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- Elizabeth Willis returns to Buffalo, where she received her Ph.D in English in the University at Buffalo’s Poetics Program, to participate in FOR LOVE: A Centenary Symposium for Robert Creeley (1926-2005), a celebration of the life and work of Buffalo’s beloved poet Robert Creeley sponsored by the UB Poetics Program.Elizabeth will join in Symposium Evening 2: “Creeley as Colleague, Collaborator, Teacher, Mentor, Poet” for a roundtable discussion with Charles Bernstein, Elizabeth Willis, Kyle Schlesinger, Aaron Lowinger, Benjamin Friedlander, Isaac Jarnot, and Joseph Conte at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, May 22nd at UB Anderson Gallery, 1 Martha Jackson Place, Buffalo, NY 14214.At 7 p.m., a reception will follow.
At 8 p.m. the evening will continue with a series of community readings and reminiscences about Creeley in Buffalo sponsored by the Poetics Program in collaboration with Just Buffalo Literary Center. All the events are free and open to the public.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.
- Elizabeth Willis returns to Buffalo, where she received her Ph.D in English in the University at Buffalo’s Poetics Program, to participate in FOR LOVE: A Centenary Symposium for Robert Creeley (1926-2005), a celebration of the life and work of Buffalo’s beloved poet Robert Creeley sponsored by the UB Poetics Program.Elizabeth will join in Symposium Evening 2: “Creeley as Colleague, Collaborator, Teacher, Mentor, Poet” for a roundtable discussion with Charles Bernstein, Elizabeth Willis, Kyle Schlesinger, Aaron Lowinger, Benjamin Friedlander, Isaac Jarnot, and Joseph Conte at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, May 22nd at UB Anderson Gallery, 1 Martha Jackson Place, Buffalo, NY 14214.At 7 p.m., a reception will follow.