Sculling On The Lethe

By: Paul Genega

€12.00

One of the great rewards of Paul Genega’s work (and for his readers there are many rewards to reap) is the poet’s immense and sophisticated apprehension of history. In his latest collection, Genega seizes much literary reference, encyclopedic fragment, information, and catalog. This book is not, however, simple recitation, for Genega fully charges all this material with a relentless, brutal, loving, hilarious sense of pl...

ISBN	978-1-912561-04-9
Pub Date	Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Cover Image	Thomas Eakins, self-portrait detail from The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Page Count	64
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One of the great rewards of Paul Genega’s work (and for his readers there are many rewards to reap) is the poet’s immense and sophisticated apprehension of history. In his latest collection, Genega seizes much literary reference, encyclopedic fragment, information, and catalog. This book is not, however, simple recitation, for Genega fully charges all this material with a relentless, brutal, loving, hilarious sense of play, by which I mean intelligent trickery, political hoopla, linguistic shenanigans and—above all—good music. Genega holds together anachronisms, mythology, newsroom rhetoric, ritual, and burlesque to compose poems that are both delightful and disorienting. The collection culminates in the stunning long poem “Shays’ Rebellion,” an anti-romantic and anti-nostalgic satire-collage which takes to task our long list of American tyrants, tycoons, sycophants, and buffoons. In Sculling On The Lethe, Paul Genega doesn’t just tell the story of a nation’s crackpot suffering, he makes that story swing.

Patrick Rosal

Paul Genega

PAUL GENEGA has published six chapbooks and six full-length collections, four with Salmon. His work has appeared in journals, anthologies and magazines for over forty years, winning awards from The Nation, New York Quarterly and The Literary Review, and an individual fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Perhaps, a portfolio of poems with etchings by Aaron Fink, is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Harvard Museums, among others. His poem "The Self-Made Man and the Moon" was turned into a robotic theater piece by Barry Brian Werger at the robotics lab at the University of Southern California and toured the US and abroad. As part of ARTS By the People’s Moving Words project, "Pharaoh" was made into an animation by Omar Mizrah and premiered at the Animix Festival in Tel Aviv in 2018. His theater piece Paging Doctor Faustus, co-authored with Patricia Lee Stotter, was performed at the FiveMyles Gallery in Brooklyn in April 2020. Earlier, the Stotter/Genega musical Haven’t We Met? was presented at The Writers Theatre in New York as part of its Developing Projects Festival. Songs from that show were reprised online as Once Upon a Happily Ever After in 2022 by Studio Theater in Exile. He has worked as full-time research assistant to the co-editors of The Jackson Pollock Catalogue Raisonné and as Contributing Editor of The Columbia Encyclopedia. In 2014, upon the death of Antje Katcher, founding editor of Three Mile Harbor Press, he assumed responsibility for the press and inaugurated an annual poetry prize. Currently, he is Professor Emeritus at Bloomfield College, New Jersey, where he founded the creative writing program, served as Chair of Humanities, and taught literature and writing for thirty years. He lives with his husband Jim and their Welsh springer spaniel Chance at the edge of the majestic Hudson in Stuyvesant, New York.

Cassandra

for Patty Stotter

Listen quick while the words

are still my making. Inside others

are waiting, night-feathered and

clawed. Words, words, they fly

from poor Cassandra. Cassandra, poor

Cassandra, less a woman now than wind.

No one dares kiss these lips

which can’t stop moving, dares touch.

See, real hands. Me, I see too

clearly. Even lids shut

such dazzle, such sharp light.

Yes, pity her… us… me…

Like the moon, the living moon

which can tongue its way through

forest, nothing stops her. She is

his. I am she. I am Cassandra

a flame which should be frozen

a buoy in heaving seas lamenting

its own clapper. I toll. I toll

like fate. She names the days. She

am Cassandra, with the truth

which makes men shudder, which makes

them laugh. They’ll soon be ash. All

but you, if you will listen while

she thinks this is her making.

Words, I give her words, unstoppable

as ocean, to roil around that once-proud

mouth. Drink, if you dare, but beware

I am Cassandra. Mine. I am the god’s

cursed with words skinned from the stars

Pulaski Skyway

Low like the mean dream

of Newark the sky must

have seemed to its builders.

Rickety now, unhinging

you fear you’ll reach the end only

thanks to magic – witch cauldrons

soldered (eye of newt intact)

to forge this highway hubris.

Fifty year old rock cackles

on the radio, loud as

the chemical sunrise, car

lifting over fetid pools of sludge.

Below lies ballad country –

swamps of sawed-up bodies

Saturday night specials

punks in concrete shoes –

and you’re stuck with flat

prose, a gas-good, yawn-blue

compact – probable

logical, responsible and dull.

A skyway wants a gasser

wants a singer, wants a lover

wants a souped-up chrome finned

speedster to ride the rising sky –

last star, lost love

wind fist, soft glove

steel grates drumming

cattails swooning shoop-shoop

trusses bleeding rust

like America’s tied veins.

Ruth’s White Glove

for Toni Morrison

The man with heavy

hands fumbles with

pearl buttons, a long

row of small buttons

shining like moons

in a universe of mites.

Down the satin white

he works, awkwardly

painstakingly, as if

he were a wave grasping

single grains of sand.

One by one he undoes

them, him all thumbs

and praying it be proper

this slow solemn rushing

solemn so slow rushing

when the last at last

releases from its loop

the glove sloughs off

and he strokes her

naked flesh, believing

the whole while it is he

who has been touched.

Other Titles from Paul Genega

All I Can Recall

€12.00

Outtakes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2023

€14.00

Sculling On The Lethe / Paul Genega