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A Fourteen-Line Poem on Heteronymic

Julie Carr

Our world goes nowhere except its own elsewhere
What kind of sentence is that?
No one is responding, but everyone is vibrating with address
All of us stationed before the same absence
Like glass sheets; we see right through us to the air
Real life is Elsewhere
It is right Here
The bald child
Is a failed clairvoyant
But he can peer through walls to teeth and other things: soap
Mathias kisses Lucy’s Head
Someone shoots my book, shoots it straight through
I allow a relation
Between addiction and adore

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Julie Carr was selected by Cole Swensen for the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Prize for her debut collection Mead: An Epithalamion.

Themes

About this Poem

“This is one of a long series of fourteen-line poems I wrote over a period of four years. The word ‘heteronymic’ is a reference to one of my favorite poets, Fernando Pessoa, who wrote in at least seventy different heteronyms. The idea of the heteronym is freeing in that it allows us to imagine that we can, in writing, become new to ourselves and arrive elsewhere. I’m curious about the limits we place on our thinking, how the world—its histories and futures—might in fact be quite other than we know or imagine. Clairvoyance (literally: clear seeing) is perhaps an impossible goal, but the strange logic of the poem reaches for possibilities.”
—Julie Carr

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More by this poet

Foreclosing on That Peril

I’ll keep explaining—because maybe you still don’t get it
Those children in California (substitute any state), dead from gunfire—
Let me begin again in a little roof garden with my friend
A perverse reader, he listens to my stories as if they were TV
I mean he mocks me lovingly on the roof and at the library book sale
My friend is not a banker but a prison activist
He used to be a philosopher, but like many philosophers, he’s taken a turn
that should be easy to understand

Julie Carr

2017

A fourteen-line poem on healing

1. I cannot freeze sound
2. or collapse phantom scaffolding
3. I open one contradiction
4. after another. They call this “erotic intelligence”
5. or emptiness
6. They abuse the powdery line
7. at once blessed and beautiful
8. and blank
9. as benign limbs

Julie Carr

2016

100 Notes on Violence [1] (audio only)

Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.

Julie Carr

2015

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A Fourteen-Line Poem on Heteronymic

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