Skylight: Poems

By Carol Muske-Dukes

Poetry from a writer celebrated as one of the most distinctive voices of her generation

Among the thirty-five poems in Skylight are sonnets, sestinas, and free verse forms on topics ranging from politics to architecture and science. In one volume, Muske-Dukes, National Book Award finalist and former Poet Laureate of California, incorporates multitudes, unified by her lyrical style and rapier-sharp observations. The sonnet “Fireflies” explores a strained relationship that is healed, for one moment, in a nighttime walk lit by the pulsing signals of firefly life. “The Funeral” confronts the stark playground atmosphere in the wake of a child’s funeral. In the melancholy and unforgettable title poem, an “apartment in the sky” in New York City spins before the reader’s eyes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jun 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480484849

Carol Muske-Dukes

Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of eight books of poems, four novels, and two essay collections, and is an editor of two anthologies, including Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, which she coedited with Bob Holman. Many of her books have been New York Times Notable selections. Muske-Dukes is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where she founded the PhD program in creative writing and literature, and she recently fulfilled her appointment as poet laureate of California, appointed by the governor’s office. Her poetry collection Sparrow was a National Book Award finalist and she is a six-time Pushcart Prize winner. She writes for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times op-ed page, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, and the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. Her poems have been published and anthologized widely, including in several editions of Best American Poetry. Muske-Dukes has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Library of Congress award, Barnes & Noble’s Writer for Writers Award, and many other honors. She lives in Southern California and New York.

Book preview

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

LOVE TO READ?

LOVE GREAT SALES?

GET FANTASTIC DEALS ON BESTSELLING EBOOKS

DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY!

Skylight

Poems

Carol Muske-Dukes

—for CURTIS CATHERINE INGHAM and THOMAS LUX

CONTENTS

Publisher’s Note

I

The Invention of Cuisine

Coral Sea, 1945

Worry

The Painter’s Daughter

Ransom

Choreography

War Crimes

Fireflies

Opium

Dream Sheriff

II

Poem

Census

Her Story: Leaving Eden

Cheap Scent

Short Histories of the Sea

Chivalry

Ahimsa

Real Estate

Golden Retriever

Women’s House

Chasers

III

Skylight

Chapter One

Tuesday Again

Special Delivery to Curtis: The Future of the World

Par

Idolatry

Coincidence

Elocution: Touch

The Fault

Androgyny

SIREN SONGS

The Funeral

Friend on Stilts

Dulce lignum, dulces clavos

Emergency

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Publisher’s Note

Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page. Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this