Tag Archives: j. kates

Metes and Bounds (Accents Publishing, 2010)

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Poet J. Kates answers a few questions about Metes and Bounds (Accents Publishing, 2010)

 

 

Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book.

Not sure there is a story to tell. I had written some poems, they seemed to fit together in theme, there was a chapbook contest from Accents Publishing, and I submitted to it. You liked it, apparently.

 

Do you still like it? Why or why not?

The poems I write that stand the editorial test of time long enough to make it to publication are poems I like. The rest, I throw away.

 

What is the highest praise you’ve received for it?

Not sure I’ve received any “praise” for Metes and Bounds. You published it, some people have bought it. That’s praise. Can’t recall if it was ever reviewed.

 

What didn’t make it in the book?

Most of the poems I’ve written in my life. Luckily, a good many have made it into other books, with, I hope, more still to come.

 

Is there a poem from the book you’d like to share with the readers of the Accents blog?

I’d like to have your readers read them all. That’s why I wrote them. If it’s your blog, you choose.

 

Selected by Katerina and inserted in the text:

DOING THE WORMS’ WORK

The first April I am certain I will die,
the ground too cold, too wet for planting,
the river only a foot down from flood,
the compost heap a contradance of bees,
I need to be looking toward a harvest.

I will turn dirt. Without stooping
to pick rocks, I do the worms’ work
for an hour or two, see how I like it,
see how I enjoy the company of worms.
Not bad, they say, not bad for a beginner .

 

How did you arrive at the title?

Ah, there’s an interesting question. In New England, where I live, it has long been customary to establish boundaries not by formal surveying, but by noting and describing landmarks (or by creating them, as with walls and cairns). All the poems in this little collection somehow have to do with limits and limitations, and there is a rural cast to them; it seemed an appropriate title. I have worried, since, however, that the title sounds a little too bucolic, characterizing my work (unfairly, I hope) as “when the Frost is on the bumpkin.” Perhaps that’s balanced by the cosmopolitanism of an earlier chapbook (Mappemonde, Oyster River Press) and by other published poems.

 

Do you have a favorite Accents Publishing book (other than yours) and if so, which one?

Partial to anthologies and to translation as I am, you can guess I’d single out The Season of Delicate Hunger, for its introduction and presentation of contemporary Bulgarian poets.

 

What would you like to see Accents do going forward?

Succeed. On your own terms.

 

What are you working on now?

I have two full-length manuscripts being widely rejected. I continue to write — including some experimental, urban prose poems — and to translate.

 

Share a poem, or at least a sentence from your new writing.

“The human in me knows how to retreat.”

“Pastorale” by J. Kates

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1

This is poison: David
fingers something budding
in my backyard. Kneeling
in the mud,

David says, otter. He
shows me where the beaver
dragged a poplar sapling
to the river,

where the elderberry
topped on a clean bevel
shows the mark of browsing
at the level

of last season’s snowfall,
finds the high-bush
blueberries in the naked
underbrush —

he in the cool evening
for a moment rightful
owner of my garden,
I a spiteful

creature in his footsteps,
naming all the animals
in their habits, birds
by their calls.

2

The northwest wind drums yesterday’s blizzard
into a victory dance, four feet thick
over the budding crocus and daffodils.

We scatter all our store of sunflower seeds
and popcorn for the puzzled birds. Split wood
lies like Shiloh’s dead under the blossoms.

This Eastertide, it is winter resurrected
to preach the annual triumphant sermon
on the impermanence of burial.

Good Friday finds us shoveling out the cars
in perfect sunshine, the day as long as ever,
white as a lily everywhere we look.

3

A hiss of hail on the new grass,
stones the size of my whitened
fingernail flail the daffodils
into confetti for half an hour,
as if you had said, I’m leaving,

and afterwards, ice dissolving
in the furrows, around the fisted
fiddleheads, and pursed tulips
nodding in their slashed foliage
as if you had said, I didn’t mean it.

4

I have washed my hands of winter in the spring dirt,
grubbing for granite, first fruit of the garden
every year. The pallor has rubbed off on my shirt,
leaving my fingers rich and dry and brown.

My arms have taken to the spade like a swimmer
lapping out the first long rows where the seed
will lie like beads brimming in the wake of summer,
tangling upward clean as the sickle’s blade.

My legs rock on the slow heave of the year,
learning to balance once again to the roll
of shifting earth, to the light wind off the river,
to the rhythm of dip and swell, of dip and swell.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds
Accents Publishing

J. KatesJ. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).

“Traipsing” by J. Kates

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We meant to work. New snow
carpeted all the tempting trails
and veiled the wood I’d stacked
against this day. We should
have hefted it to the pick-up
and ridden it back to the house.

But hell. The sun was shining
(as my wife would say, meaning:
it’s obvious) and the woods
were lovely, light as they can be
when all the leaves lie underfoot,
and the truck had busted a front tire.

Here’s to the day, the kids whacking
at hemlocks with a broken beech,
the grown-ups chattering lazily,
the grouse keeping quiet and the deer,
nothing but footprints. And here’s
to hot apple cider and cold beer.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds
Accents Publishing

J. KatesJ. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).

“Snapshot, New Hampshire Path” by J. Kates

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Metes and Bounds

The ruined tower of a white pine stump
stands like an empty Norman monument
of conquest and defense.

There is a girl who climbs with diffidence
the icy road, balancing on a clump
of snow with such intent

that her whole body from the knees is bent.
She keeps herself in temporal suspense
from falling on her rump.

Just as she executes an awkward jump,
I swing my camera, catching her descent
and its small consequence.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds
Accents Publishing

J. KatesJ. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).

“The Faucet” by J. Kates

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Bigger Than They Appear

I am not so easily turned off.
All night the hot syllable of my name
will tap at irregular intervals
onto the cold and ringing porcelain
of your most private room.

Twist until the clean metal
burns bruises into your sleepless hand.
I have found a way
to keep the water running
one tear at a time.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds
Accents Publishing

More from Metes and Bounds and J. Kates:

J. KatesJ. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).

“Stakes” by J. Kates

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Metes and Bounds1

This is my territory —
I mate only on the edge of it,
I prowl the perimeter
up to the river and down to one certain tree.

2

Where is the center?
I have never been in so far
but it is no less mine.

3

Surveyors never work alone:
somebody holds the line.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds
Accents Publishing

More from Metes and Bounds and J. Kates:

J. KatesJ. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).