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- 104 pages
- English
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About This Book
A remarkable sequence of sonnets that reflect contemporary daily life in New York City Scaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, Eléna Rivera uses the English sonnet as a scaffold to explore daily events, observations, conversations, thoughts, words, and memories—and to reflect on the work of earlier poets and the relationship between life and literature.Guided by formal and syllabic constraints, the poems become in part an exploration of how form affects content and how other poets have approached the sonnet. The poems, which are very attentive to rhythm and sound, are often in conversation with historical, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources. But at the same time they engage directly with the present moment. Like the construction scaffolding that year after year goes up around buildings all over New York, these poems build on one another and change the way we see what was there before.
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SEPT. 19TH POEM FOR ALICE 1
She turns her head, recites “… the houses are all
going”—they’re shadows now, neighborhood expunged
“… see a house brought down/like a hunted creature”
A double-backed house, before the highways came,
and waxen white magnolias on a porch where
friends called to hear stories about ancestors,
the tales of a place “where murdered beauties hang”
on a porch on Calliope Street, New Orleans—
The voice of a city that in fact needed
tales of “facade gardens,” “electric flowers,”
of times gone by, Alice recalled hot summers—
Cars collide, horns blast, jackhammers drill their holes
She watched a streetcar slowly go round a bend
Talks, writes about New Orleans “gone/the houses …”
SEPT. 20TH POEM FOR ALICE 2 (REVISED N.D.)
Today go out to the cafeteria
Long silvery hair in a big bun on top
Tortoiseshell comb—Calvin “is going to work”
watch, chain, suspenders—80 degrees at 8
The familiar theme about Sonny why he …
Each blaming the other: A says C too hard
Tomorrow going trout and croaker fishing
Then all order dessert, 4 the hottest time
Talks about the old place on Calliope Street,
about what a great fisherman Sonny was
Tips the waiter modestly, remembers him
Several did not get to Louisiana
Many complaints about not driving safely
News comes in, then there’s the usual argument
SEPT. 22ND
Certain stories travel, others dragon dreams
No trace of telling just faint hints of Spenser
Seeing father’s penis, the wiry black hairs
Years later that’s what assonance would look like
Told to “loosen up” but frightened of insects
Backward and forward not knowing what to feel
Riches hidden, sought around every corner
Every prince a man forcing himself, his “rod”
In out the words piled on top of the story
Wanted it, the body yearned for something fine
Shoes thrown in a corner, a single mattress
A rock idolized in high school on top hairs
Taking her while her mind latched on to a script
A film of the knight and forever after
SEPT. 24TH
Top of the tree, a place to settle the eye—
troubled by the way the dolls stayed suspended
Didn’t disappear which was what the two girls
wanted, the grand-aunt’s gift to disappear—she
who read Defoe and also gave chocolates
The dolls were discarded not “dropped” as lies were,
and her angry hurt words, “Why did you throw them?”
That night the large figure making the sign of
the cross on our foreheads where guilt was written—
the shame and pleasure of willfulness—Crusoe,
these dolls, and chocolate, all out of order
even if other “small” “thin” dolls flourished in
the small girls’ thoughts, they darted to the bottom
ashamed as the dolls hung on eloquently
SEPT. 25TH
WHAT IS IT ABOUT IRREVERENCE YOU ASK?
“Mind your own business” said mind to its tailor
“Tough going this sonnet business” said ego
to its neighbor “We’re not talking of a fight,
we’re talking about sincerity, putting
one’s all in the song” “Is that all? Figures, thought
you meant to give up your center to enter”
“You might want to rephrase that in the future”
“Never” “Nobody said change would be easy”
“In known periods of transition beware of
grief known at times of departures to ensnare
one unawares” “We were trying to assuage
here” “You said ‘all’” “I said ‘putting one’s all in’”
“Figures, I thought boredom would curb you” “I’m back
at the entrance, let the virtual line begin”
SEPT. 29TH
Old stone house, no running water, spiders, mice
Everything dry, heat rises, winds blow dust, burns
the metal of the car, the nearby beach—oh
have to get in the car if they want to go
to the beach, and parents not speaking again—
“Après on ira acheter du pain au
village”—nothing but anticipation for now,
the water, sand, Fanta, multicolored flags,
the ice cream (can barely contain ourselves), run!
They’re at the beach in August, mother reading,
father runs after them laughing then diving,
a Greek god for a while until new rage grabs
—in the end and on her own she watches as
her brother and sister build their sandcastles
SEPT. 30TH
in front of altars sat all enthralled before
art is the reason the smell of marigolds
a cardboard comfort this making this needing
the energy there in your body could heal
cares come when caring at stake so caring is,
worries are a metronome wipe the windshields
practically speaking people need their parts
again a question of not waiting for things
all asking is a form of farming, first ask
then plant poetries, presence a possible
conve...
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- July 14th From 80 La Salle
- July 30th
- July 31st Shell-Words
- Aug. 5th
- Aug. 8th For Thomas Hardy (Revised June 5th)
- Aug. 9th
- Started Aug. 11th (Finished Feb. 20th)
- Aug. 12th With Wordsworth
- Aug. 13th
- Aug. 14th
- Aug. 15th For William Shakespeare
- Aug. 16th
- Aug. 18th (Version 2)
- Aug. 19th
- Aug. 20th
- Aug. 21st
- Aug. 22nd
- Aug. 23rd For Coleridge
- Aug. 26th For Inger Christensen
- Aug. 27th
- Aug. 28th
- Aug. 29th
- Aug. 31st
- Sept. 1st
- Sept. 5th
- Sept. 9th The Translation
- Sept. 10th None Donne Sonnet
- Sept. 11th Morning Sonnet
- Sept. 12th For George Herbert
- Sept. 15th (Revised July 19th, Finished Jan. 22nd)
- Sept. 17th (Finished July 20th)
- Sept. 18th For Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Sept. 19th Poem for Alice 1
- Sept. 20th Poem for Alice 2 (Revised n.d.)
- Sept. 22nd
- Sept. 24th
- Sept. 25th
- Sept. 29th
- Sept. 30th
- Oct. 1st
- Oct. 2nd
- Oct. 3rd (Version 1)
- Oct. 3rd (Version 2, Revised n.d.)
- Oct. 7th “Confess that it is so”
- Oct. 8th (Revised July 8th)
- Oct. 9th (Finished July 24th)
- Oct. 10th [When a sonnet had too many words]
- Oct. 13th And you feel it in the body
- Oct. 14th
- Oct. 15th
- Oct. 20th
- Oct. 21st (Version 1)
- Oct. 21st (Version 2)
- Oct. 22nd
- Oct. 24th
- Oct. 27th (Revised Jan. 28th)
- Oct. 29th
- Oct. 30th (Revised March 20th)
- Oct. 31st (Version 1)
- Oct. 31st (Version 2)
- Nov. 4th
- Nov. 5th Election Sonnet
- Nov. 10th
- Nov. 19th (Revised March 26th)
- Nov. 24th (Finished Aug. 3rd)
- Nov. 27th
- Dec. 4th (Revised n.d.)
- Dec. 10th After Thomas Wyatt (Revised Feb. 1st)
- Dec. 11th (Revised n.d.)
- Dec. 22nd
- Jan. 18th The Inauguration
- Feb. 9th For Spenser (Version 1)
- Feb. 11th For Spenser (Version 2, Revised n.d.)
- March 10th (Finished Aug. 7th, A Year Later)
- Oct. 23rd March 23rd
- Sept. 16th April 7th For Edmund Spenser (Version 3)
- April 10th (Revised n.d.)
- April 13th After Sophocles
- Aug. 4th April 15th
- April 16th Still Life
- July 17th April 23rd
- Acknowledgments