Patrick Doud

The Next Big Thing

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Patrick Doud

I was tagged in “The Next Big Thing,” a self-interview chain for writers with books coming out. Thanks, Mark Lamoureux, for tagging me. (Mark is one of my favorite poets, and two new books of his are about to come out or just out. I’ve already spent time with both; they are fantastic.) The timing for this interview is good, as I only just learned there actually is a book coming sometime soon.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The publisher, a book arts studio in England called Some Odd Pages, suggested we do a handmade, limited edition of out-of-print poems. The artist behind the studio, Meg Green, does beautiful, beautiful work. There has been a kind of collaboration between us for many years, the art of one feeding the other, a back and forth; but this is our first book.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Adaptations are wrong more often than not. But for the sake of the exercise… Rock and or earth could play the trees and other flora, and the trees etc could play the birds. The birds could play the quadrupeds. And the quadrupeds could play all those with a greater number of legs. And those with the most legs of all could play the ones with the least, the humans. Music and measure could be weather, air. No one could play water. Ghosts, maybe.

What is the one sentence synopsis of the book?

La prière est la porte et l’amour est la clé. …Not really. Maybe? I don’t know.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Seems like a long while. It gathers four books of poems into one. The first is from the early nineties.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

If you can say when you are thirsty that you are inspired to drink—it was or is like that. Part of a life system. Within which is room for many “others.”

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I should mention specifically the earlier, out-of-print books the new book will gather: Girding the Ghost, The Man in Green, Hickory Bardolino Poems, and a fourth that has not yet been published.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Another chance to plug the great Some Odd Pages, the publisher.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:

Posted in Poetry | Tagged Amanda Cook, Cheryl Clark Vermeulen, Claudia Smith, Girding the Ghost, Hickory Bardolino Poems, Joseph Torra, Mark Lamoureux, Maryrose Larkin, Meg Green, Ruth Lepson, Some Odd Pages, The Man in Green | 1 Comment

Happy Halloween

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Patrick Doud

Here’s a poem for the day from my book The Man in Green, published back in 1996 by Lee Chapman’s First Intensity Press.

The Pumpkins at Panther Lake

Another ambivalent landscape, October
a boy hangs a dummy
from a flagpole into dark late morning
of interior embered still
with years into the earliness, the myth residing
at a barned-in shore, a
ghost-burnt afternoon gone north
for pumpkins on the swell of
all the riches of the childish and innocent
grotesque, affirmed in what the great
pillaring oaks by the lake suggested; scarecrow-witches
of delight come longing
in anniversary—that
precise magic—mist-scent
tight in the mask’s mold
through eye-holes into the image-lode’s
permission, about to return
to memory the inside

Posted in Poetry | Tagged First Intensity Press, Lee Chapman, Panther Lake, The Man in Green | Leave a comment

The Publick Universal Friend, Mary Tammer: sources of The Mornith War

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Patrick Doud

Across the entire breadth of New York State, undeviating, a hilly strip scarcely twenty-five miles wide invites the world’s wonder. It is a broad psychic highway, a thoroughfare of the occult whose great stations number the mystic seven. For where, in its rolling course from east of Albany to west of Buffalo, it has reached one of seven isolated and lonely heights, voices out of other worlds have spoken with spiritual authority to men and women, and the invisible mantles of the prophets have been laid on consecrated shoulders.

—Carl Carmer, Listen for a Lonesome Drum

In my mid-twenties a wise friend, recognizing the tenor of my love for my home state, suggested I read Carl Carmer’s 1936 book, Listen for a Lonesome Drum: A York State Chronicle. There, in the chapter “The Woman Who Died Twice,” I first learned of Jemima Wilkinson, also known as the Universal Friend, a spiritual leader in late-18th and early-19th century Western New York.

A Rhode Islander who claimed to have died of plague in 1776 and to have been reborn as God’s messenger, Jemima Wilkinson acquired a large and prosperous following while still a young woman. Some of her preaching diverged enough from that of the established churches for conflict to arise, and so she and her followers left civilization for the frontier. Buying land in the area around the northern ends of Keuka and Seneca lakes, the Universal Friend spent the rest of her life there, trying to realize and maintain her vision of a new Jerusalem. (A 1964 biography, Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, The Publick Universal Friend, by Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr., was recently reprinted by Cornell.)

Because I grew up in places not very far to the east and west of where she built her community, and because I identify that part of the world as home, Jemima Wilkinson’s amazing, strange story has a special fascination for me. Early on in my infatuation, I began a long poem on the Universal Friend—having in mind something like Kenneth Irby’s “Jed Smith and the Way” or those parts of Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems that deal at length with figures from Gloucester’s past—but decided not to continue work beyond the research and notes stage.

Until fifteen years later, when I was writing The Mornith War. The Universal Friend had stayed with me all that time, and I found myself translating the person I had imagined through a historical perspective into a character of fantasy, and the figure around which the story revolves: Mary Tammer, the Prophet of Free Farm.

Posted in Fantasy, Place, Poetry, Sources, Winnitok Tales | Tagged Carl Carmer, Charles Olson, Free Farm, Jemima Wilkinson, Kenneth Irby, Listen for a Lonesome Drum, Mary Tammer, Mornith War, Public Universal Friend, The Maximus Poems, Universal Friend, Western New York | Leave a comment

The serpent on the beach: sources of The Mornith War

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Patrick Doud

As I was at work on The Mornith War, something mysterious happened in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the city where I live.

For decades, a painting of a serpentine creature endured on a big rock on Cressy’s Beach, a beautiful place on the western side of Gloucester Harbor. Here’s a picture I took in 1991, visiting the creature with poets Ken Irby (on the left) and Gerrit Lansing.

No one I ever spoke to knew who was responsible for the original painting, or who touched it up from time to time, keeping it from being rubbed away by the elements. Years gave the serpent a sense of permanence, so that it seemed to me it would last a long, long time.

Then, one night in October 2009, someone took a roller and white paint to the beach and covered the serpent.

This brought on a series of Gloucester Times stories [First Gloucester Times story, second Gloucester Times story, third Gloucester Times story, fourth Gloucester Times story,], uncovering who (a well-known Gloucester painter named Robert Stephenson), what (he had painted Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent deity of Mesoamerican myth), and when (a beach party in 1954, when Stephenson was 19 … making the outdoor painting fifty five years old at the time it was defaced). What the articles never did uncover, though, was who blotted out the painting, and why.

The question of why really got to me—and does still. It was not done by someone who wanted to restore the rock to its natural state: the huge blotch of white looked more unnatural than the painting it covered. Why would someone go to the trouble of covering the serpent, but apparently not care what they put in its place? It occured to me one explanation might be religious belief, since people of certain faiths regard even pictures of mythical creatures as demonic. It was my guess that someone living in sight of the serpent believed it signified evil, and with that guess the serpent on the beach gave birth to the mourgel in The Mornith War.

Posted in Fantasy, Place, Sources, Winnitok Tales | Tagged Cressy's Beach, Gerrit Lansing, Gloucester MA, Kenneth Irby, Mornith War, Quetzalcoatl | Leave a comment

Mourning doves, Lorine Niedecker: sources of The Mornith War

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Patrick Doud

The Mornith War is full of things that got my attention at the time I was writing. Events in my neighborhood, my world … books I was reading … my nightly dreams and nightmares … whatever parts of my experience overlapped with the story I was telling. Here begins a series of short posts about these sources, each revealing something from outside the story that found its way in.

A common bird around my house (I can see one perching on the peak of a neighbor’s roof as I write this), mourning doves have a small but important part in The Mornith War. I grew up hearing and loving their call, and (no surprise) the chapter 3 description of Elwood’s boyhood experience with mourning doves is a lot like my own. (Here are some sound samples.) But the call has special significance for Elwood, the bird’s voice—sounding like the question, Who?—reminding him of his divided self, his lost other.

Writing that chapter 3 passage about Elwood’s past, and my hearing of the mourning dove’s call in particular, I remembered a short Lorine Niedecker poem. Looking it up again I found that she wrote, “the You/ah you/of mourning doves” (Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, pg 181, University of California Press, 2002). The poem too hears the bird’s call as though it were English, and in it a lost someone is also mourned.

I read this as a sign I was on the right path, with the birdcall at least, and carried the mourning dove clear to the book’s final page.

Posted in Fantasy, Fauna, Poetry, Sources, Winnitok Tales | Tagged Lorine Niedecker, Mornith War, mourning doves, Winnitok Tales | Leave a comment

June blooms, Fernwood Lake

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Patrick Doud

The last post—about wanting to crawl into flowers like a bug—focused on some of the flowers that were then in bloom on the big rock beside my house. I had planned to follow that with another June flower post, this time dealing with Fernwood, a small lake in the woods to the north.

So, to bridge the gap between the last post and the next: Here are some of the pictures that would have gone with the piece I was planning to write, back before the neglect set in.

On the land bridge that crosses a corner of Fernwood Lake, I found what I think was sheep laurel. This spot isn’t far from the part of the woods where mountain laurel grows, the subject of an earlier post.

Also there were stands of pickerelweed. Along with the water lilies, they made the lake’s edge feel swampy. (Once, years ago, I came upon a big snapping turtle crossing my path at this end of the lake. I was totally surprised, and almost failed to call my dog back before he put his poor nose in striking distance of the turtle’s beak.)

There, a smidgen of last summer’s glory. Onward.

Posted in Flora, Place, Woods | Tagged Fernwood Lake, pickerelweed, sheep laurel, water lily | Leave a comment

Blooms of June at Blackberry Rock

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Patrick Doud

Drawn to flowers, I imagine what it would be like if I were able, in terms of scale, to switch with them. I am thinking of a flower so much larger than myself that its colors, textures, and smell encompass my senses; a flower big enough to make my immediate surroundings, like a room or a hillside; a flower that’s a place where my whole body can go.

Near the beginning of Ogin, when Elwood tastes the food of Ehm for the first time, his spirit leaves his body. In “a desert of white rock” he finds

a giant flower of fiery red growing up out of the floor of the waste. The stem was so bowed by the flower’s weight that the ends of two long curving petals touched the dust of the ground. Like stairs, he climbed the petals into the flower’s heart.

Now, judging by its outside, the giant red flower’s inside is not what you might expect. The flower is a portal, a passage to somewhere else—which is different from what I have been dreaming about this past Spring and early Summer, paying more attention than usual to what blooms around me. A fair-sized granite heap occupies much of the view out my second-floor study’s east window. By Cape Ann standards it is not very big; still, the portion above ground could be compared to two or three bungalows pushed together. Wickedly thorned blackberry vines proliferate on and around this mass of granite and would completely overrun it if I did not keep them in check. For that reason—and because I like the sound—I call it Blackberry Rock.

Little masonry walls built a hundred years ago remain, pieces of Blackberry Rock itself that past inhabitants had cut off, shaped, and built back into the land. Dead matter has turned to earth and filled the hollows, making places for tall grasses and staghorn sumac to grow. Mice hide there, cats hunt there. Innumerable minibeasts crawl the Rock’s surface; mockingbirds land and flash their wings. It is a whole world, or a world of many worlds (“Worlds on top of worlds,” as Elwood says); home of many and part of my own home. It is always changing with the light, with the life.

Blackberries are just one of the flowering plants that grow on and around the Rock: I might also call it Lavender Rock, or Bindweed Rock, or one of many others. For example, on a shelf on the side closest to the house, the comely chive blooms every year:

But not for long. This beauty comes and goes in just a few weeks.

Down on the morning side of Blackberry Rock, a little patch of lavender is flourishing.

Maybe my favorite flower-smell after lilac.

A few feet from the lavender grows a small colony of red carpet stonecrop.

At least, I think it’s red carpet. There are so many in the sedum genus, it’s hard for me to be sure.

Maybe even more prolific on Blackberry Rock than blackberries: mossy stonecrop.

Mossy stonecrop (again, it’s hard to be sure it’s that succulent in particular) covers sections of our place like carpet. I would like to encourage it to cover more.Bindweed, field bindweed, field morning glory, creeping jenny… this is also very prolific, especially around the Rock’s human-made walls.According to my Golden Guide to Weeds, bindweed “is one of the most difficult of all weeds to eradicate,” due to a root system “sometimes penetrating to a depth of 10 feet.”

I love the shape of the leaves, and the flowers are beautiful, furled and unfurled.

For a long time I mistook bittersweet nightshade for deadly nightshade. Because bittersweet grows everywhere around Blackberry Rock, I was constantly ripping it up. The berries are green now, but they ripen a beautiful, tomato-like orange, then red.They are not good for you either, but I gather they are nowhere near as toxic as Atropa belladonna.