“Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Cortinas are ten-word poems made with a camera while walking. The language is gathered from the cityscape (signs, graffiti, stickers, etc.), in photographs, one word at a time in order of discovery, so that the subsequent word is closer to the walk’s destination than the prior. A Ford-model vehicle sold primarily in the United Kingdom from 1962 until 1982, the Cortina was named after Cortina d’Ampezzo, a town in the Italian Alps. In a number of Romance languages, cortina means curtain, and it also echoes or is related to other words that evoke enclosure, law, love, obscurity, cooking, and servitude, which all seem relevant to the vocation or curse of poetry. In order to travel back into the landscape, the poems will also be made into bumper stickers. Several of them are available for purchase at the “Bumper Stickers” page at this site.
My First Vision Was of Gabriel Standing In a Fire was published by The Economy Press in October 2023.
Rumeurs des villes was published in February 2024 by If a Leaf Falls Press.
