William Cordeiro
Epistolary poems have a tradition spanning back at least to the Latin classics when poems were exchanged among small coteries of the literati; the form had another heyday in the eighteenth century. Throughout its long history, however, epistolary verse has been distinctly addressed to multiple recipients: the ostensible addressee (though sometimes that addressee is dead or inanimate, thus making the overture an apostrophe) as well as the wider audience who has the privilege of "intercepting" and overhearing the exchange. Within this form, then, the intimate scribble is opposed to the published script, just as the rise of letter-writing, however furtive and private any individual correspondence may have been, depended on the postal system which was, in part, responsible for the formation of the public sphere. My own interest in the epistolary form derives from the plurality of significance that confronts us when we realize that the personal and the public meanings of letters may diverge, or even act ironically upon each other, when seemingly affectionate notes are placed in a more public context.
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To Rilke, On My Bad Poems
After your voice’s wake, reminder
of the star-trace voided on each skull’s rind;
the fire-wrought thin skin-graft of your words
falls like the slap of new-seen faces.
But, when I quote myself back to myself,
arrested in a poem I’ve erased over
sixteen years, my tongue molests me.
—Swan’s scuttle under water’s scroll:
that white trumpeter with ungainly feet
glides effortless across remainder’s mater,
echo of a fresco’s flaking tromp l’œil.
I fear my teeth will grow together.
Note to Self
To you who retrospect
the mind’s own palinode,
I, advancing yet, redact
and turn down lanes you rode
or lines you wrote, all change
you river in your bones.
Your spine now boomerangs
at intersects I’d been
as if the current holds
the washing of its own
pained trepan for slow gold
where crossroads carry on;
as if compact, each whole
experience consumed
itself, light ate till full
and gluttingly illumed:
no waste result, no spill,
which over wasn’t under used.
Each memory’s overkill
rubbed out its residue.
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Will Cordeiro currently lives in Tucson, though he is a Ph.D. candidate studying 18th century British literature at Cornell University. Recent work included or forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, Flyway, Copper Nickel, Sentence, Raintown Review, and elsewhere.