A Fourteen-Line Poem on Heteronymic
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
Copyright © 2019 by Julie Carr. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 21, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“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
Julie Carr
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.