HWS News
10 April 2020 McCorkles New Book Part of Polyphonic Trio
A new book from Etruscan Press puts the work of three poets, including Visiting Associate Professor of Africana Studies James McCorkle '76, in conversation with one another.
In Triptych, which will be published May 5, McCorkles In Time appears alongside The Three-Legged World by Peter Grandbois and Orpheus & Echo by Robert Miltner. Each book, the publisher notes, exerted upon our editors a gravitational pull, causing the shadow of one to fall across the reading of another. Sufficient on their own, these books achieve new altitudes when aligned.
As a whole, Triptych engages with the inter-textual tradition of literature and of poetry in particular, which, rippling from unmeasured sound into rampant forms, is especially polyphonic. In Miltners ogham-deep caesuras, in McCorkles speech-song, and in Grandboiss cadences which whisper like ghostly passersby, sound is emanation, and emanation asks, what would this line be without the words?
In his poem The Visible World, McCorkle writes:
Here, already a memory: what a word would have
been, or you, suddenly here, too
in flight to here, but not arrived, yet
a green premonition
or, again to start: a joy to see
a familiar, a figure before flowers, gold-green
feathers, ruby throat, first Ive seen here
small joy, like a memory arcing into sight
then back into the heights of long-needle
pines, the shrill of cicadas tighten
the air, royal Poinciana flare
here in August, a wash of red. Opulent
vessels, carriers of souls, heading across the gulf
we move in this world with longing.
McCorkle is the author of Evidences (selected by Jorie Graham for the 2003 APR-Honickman First Book Award) and The Subtle Bodies(Etruscan Press 2014). His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Kenyon Review, Manoa, New England Review, and Poetry. A 1976 graduate of Hobart College, he earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and is a recipient of fellowships from Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at the Colleges since 2001.