Creative Matters

Glimpse Making

Authors

  • M. Boruch Purdue University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5463/ejlw.1.37

Abstract

There’s rain and there’s rain. Maybe there’s a difference at the edge of a continent. Late afternoon when we entered the cabin. I didn’t know the guy. A friend of a friend of a friend bent over the old phonograph–a record player we called them as kids, small and nearly square, with dull silver buckles, a plastic handle, worn leatherette skin. The kind you lower the arm and bring the needle down yourself. Like sparking a flame, that quick broken note before it takes and follows the groove of the record, into music. We stood and listened to him listening. I have no idea: jazz or a slow ballad, some rock star burning out in a year or two. So many scratches, the wash of static, the rain outside. How the ear gets past all that, and surrenders. Or his hunger, so deeply tangled. Had I ever seen such pleasure? The moment just before, how it really sounded.

Author Biography

M. Boruch, Purdue University

Marianne Boruch is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon, 2011) and Grace, Fallen from (Wesleyan, 2008). Other work includes two books of essays, Poetry’s Old Air (Michigan, 1993) and In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005), and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry Review, The London Review of Books, Poetry, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. Among her awards are Guggenheim and NE A fellowships as well as residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and Isle Royale National Park in the US. In winter/spring 2012, she was a UK Fulbright/Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh. For many years she has taught in the MFA program at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Published

2012-12-05

Issue

Vol. 1 (2012): EJLW

Section

Creative Matters

Copyright (c) 2012 M Boruch

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