C. S. Giscombe

The author describes his life-long fascination with Canada, describing his time spent living in British Columbia; the stories of mining, pioneer life, and cannibalism he uncovered in his travels; and his experiences with border crossings.

Into and Out of Dislocation

Dodie Bellamy

Lisa Jarnot

Nancy Princenthal

Alice Notley

Anne Waldman

Bernadette Mayer

David Antin

Kerry E. Sherin

Janet Zweig

Ron Silliman

Memoir/anti-memoir

Judith Margolis

Late in the fall of 2017, poet C. S. Giscombe and book artist Judith Margolis boarded an Amtrak train in New York City and, four days later, stepped off another train at the edge of San Francisco Bay. Giscombe was returning home to California to address an all-white audience on the problem of white supremacy, and expatriate Margolis, accustomed to a somewhat solitary existence, was visiting the United States and making collages. Traveling together, they each turned their train quarters into writing and drawing "studios" where they engaged in conversations and arguments and shared experiences of the discomforts and failures of recent times. Their original intention had been to travel west and document, in journals and sketchpads, the complex, charged American landscape, but as the trip progressed--and in the months afterwards--the project took on a new shape. Train Music, the book that resulted, recollects and explores the century's racial and gendered conflicts--sometimes sensually, sometimes in stark images, sometimes in a "mixed economy" of poetry and prose.

Train Music

C. S. Giscombe's Here is a long, single poem that takes place in a progression of three settings, three unlikely locations: the edges of the urban south, the edges--just beyond and just within the city--of rural Ohio, and the places where upstate New York forms the border with Canada, "the next country." Here is racial in its knowledge and acknowledgment of the great geographic archetype, the journey north; yet the work's nature denies the closure of destination. The poem's interest instead is in statement(s) of situation, in "the path traced by a moving point." "C.S. Giscombe makes evident a genius of attention to all the determinants of any one of us, our particulars, our people. He traces with consummate art the passage of time through his own accumulating presence, his points of origin and return" - Robert Creeley "Here is a powerful, understated meditation on place, ancestry and time. Establishing themes in the first poem (ironically titled after an old railway slogan, "Look Ahead-Look South"), Giscombe looks back to Birmingham, Ala., from a vantage point in the North (...) A diffuse, open technique avoids the hazard Giscombe identifies as "aimless description" and is able to take in a great deal of material, mimicking the processes of memory." - Publisher's Weekly

Here

C. S. Giscombe's Here is a long, single poem that takes place in a progression of three settings, three unlikely locations: the edges of the urban south, the edges -- just beyond and just within the city -- of rural Ohio, and the places where upstate New York forms the border with Canada, "the next country." Here is racial in its knowledge and acknowledgment of the great geographic archetype, the journey north; yet the work's nature denies the closure of destination. The poem's interest instead is in statement(s) of situation, in "the path traced by a moving point." First published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1994, now available again.

C. S. Giscombe

Books

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