Time and Fevers: New and Selected Poems

By E. M. SCHORB

Winner of the 16th Annual Writers Digest Self-Published Award for Poetry, 2008

An Eric Hoffer Book Award Winner, 2007

I am always happy to drop everything--pretty nearly--when I make the acquaintance of a new poet as good as E.M. Schorb. James Dickey

The poems of E.M. Schorb shine calmly even as they buzz with energy; are connaissant with the world and yet transcendent of it; make something deeply funny and yet highly sad--given a world and a time and a good minds eye. This is the work of a mature intelligence, its ironies unadulterated by cynicism, and its swells informed by understatement. Heather McHugh

Schorbs poetry is rich with humor and an almost gestaltic sense of clarity; this unique voice allows him to maintain a tonal unity while moving through a variety of forms. Raymond Thibodeaux, "New Delta Review"

Schorb draws from science, art, literary history, and popular culture, balancing these subjects in a thoughtfully conceived and organized book. Lurking behind all is the danger and violence of life--call it mans and natures inhumanity to each other--which Schorb handles maturely, without cynicism, and often with a humor that places him somewhere between Marvin Bell and Kenneth Koch. Todd Verdun, "The Carolina Quarterly"

I think Ed Schorb is one of our very finest poets. Some of the poems are breathtaking both for their literary skill and for their human appeal. E.M. Schorbs work has range, variety, wit, depth and a zest for both language and life. Anthony S. Abbott,poet and author of the Novello Prize winning novel, Leaving Maggie Hope

"Schorb's poems are good modern poems, on a high literary level--some are touched with greatness." Cornel Lengyel, poet, playwright, publisher: Dragon's Teeth Press

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 20, 2004
• ISBN: 9781418406646

E. M. SCHORB

E.M. Schorb began publishing in small literary magazines as an undergraduate at New York University.  His work has since appeared widely, here and abroad, in such publications as The Yale Review, The American Scholar, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Notre Dame Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Chicago Review .  He has received Fellowships from The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, The North Carolina Arts Council, and The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.  Murderer's Day, his third collection, was a recipient of the Verna Emery Poetry  Prize and published by Purdue University Press.  He now resides with his wife, Patricia, in North Carolina.

Book preview

TIME AND FEVERS

New and Selected Poems

E. M. SCHORB

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1663LIBERTY DRIVE, SUITE200

BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA47403

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© 2004 E. M. SCHORB

All Rights Reserved-

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 04/14/04

ISBN: 1-4184-0664-3 (e)

ISBN: 1-4184-0663-5 (sc)

ISBN: 1-4184-0662-7 (dj)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2003098627

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

I

Travelling Child

Camden

Come A Cropper

Obituary

Hadewijch In Wall Street

Letters Home

The Orphaned

Five Forevers

The Letter

Case History

Kindred Spirits

The Kite

The Poor Boy

O To Be Rich And Powerful

Late Sleeper

Kid Danger

Words In Passing

Death Row

Night Life

The North Of Love

Dirge For The Dead Students (Kent State University, Ohio, 1970)

II

Martial Music At A Band Concert

Tracers

Allegorical Fountain

Paris Recidivist

Sharp

Troop Transport

The Survivor

The Castle

Copperheads

III

Bar Song

The Applicant

The Prayer

Upstate Storm

New Man On The Docks

The Thin Disease

A Worker At The Waterworks

Ready To Walk

Detective Story

IV

On Muddling Through

Insect Song

Tippy Remembers Lawyer Smythe

Wheel Of Fortune

Education

Life Surprised Me

A Tumble For Skelton

Oomancy

No

To A Rat

An Appalachian Tale

The Fine Art Of Haunting

The Transformation

V

A Fable

VI

Poetry In Motion

Metaphysics Of The Big Woman

The Big Crunch

The Secret Agent

An Antiquary Of The Future

Wallace Stevens Contemplates Sunday Service In Haddam

Rodin, Balzac, And The Thinker

Ode On Sex

To The Mind

Speculative Ode

Elegy For A Late Tornado

Hush, Hush, New House In Charlotte

Now, The Fox!

The Night Sweats

Murderer’s Day

Anthologies Are Sad

Good Works Are Love

Art

Inspiration At The Art Gallery

Flashbacks

Spring Rides

VII

An Evening With "Blood

The Diamond Merchant

Houdini And The Dying Swan

The Nun

Pollock

Leadbelly

Singlewide

Elegy

Lily

Incognito

A Hundred Years

The Fallen Angel

Lost Sketches By Bosch

Snowbound

The Getaway

VIII

And/Or

The Ideologues

IX

The Souls

The Loss

The Crow And The Scarecrow

Paso Finos

The Honey House

Destruction

Waterfall

X

Because

Dialogue Of The Suicide And The Smoker

What The Dead See

The Artesian Diver

Commence Fire!

Mourning Love

Ballad

A Triangle Of Lights

Old Women, Pausing

The Nursing Home

Balding

Heart Failure

Toward The End

Death

Spring And The Black Holes

Hire Actors!

A Reply

Postcard

Roanoke Return

Where Are You?

Names Of The Dead

Gin Rummies

Death. Com

Hope And The Bipolar Poet

Chronicle

At The Gate

Provenance Of An Old Poet

About The Author

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photo copyright L. Datené

Time and fevers burn away

Individual beauty from

Thoughtful children, and the grave

Proves the child ephemeral…

—W.H. Auden

Poetry, I have insisted, is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul. This would seem to be an introverted, even solipsistic, enterprise, if it were not that these stories recount the soul’s passage through the valley of this life—that is to say, its adventure in time …

—Stanley Kunitz

Also by E.M. Schorb

Poetry

A Fable & Other Prose Poems

Murderer’s Day

50 Poems

The Poor Boy and Other Poems

Novels

A Portable Chaos

Scenario for Scorsese

Paradise Square

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Poems in this selection have appeared in the following pub-lications:

The American Scholar; The Antigonish Review (Canada); Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry (1980, 1981, and 1986-88); The Arkansas Review; The Arts Journal; Ascent; The Asheville Poetry Review; The Atlanta Review; The Beloit Poetry Journal; The Birmingham Poetry Review; The Brownstone Review; The Carolina Quarterly; The Chariton Review; The Chattahoochee Review; Chelsea; The Chicago Review; The Chiron Review; The Cincinnati Review; The Classical Outlook; The Coe Review; College English; The Comstock Review; Context South; Confrontation; The Crab Orchard Review; Crucible; Cutbank; The Dalhousie Review (Canada); The Dark Horse (Scotland); The Davidson Miscellany; Descant; The Dramatists Guild Quarterly; Envoi (England); The Eureka Literary Magazine; The Fiddlehead (Canada); The Formalist; Frank (France); Gallery (England); The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review; The Hawaii Review; The Hollins Critic; The International Poetry Review; The Iowa Review; Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; Journal of New Jersey Poets; The Kansas Quarterly; Keats Prize Poems (London Literary Editions, Ltd.); Kobisena (India); The Lake Superior Review; The Laurel Review; The Literary Review; The Long Island Quarterly; Maelstrom; The Massachusetts Review; The Midwest Poetry Review; NC Arts (Magazine of the North Carolina Arts Council); The New Delta Review; The New Laurel Review; New Letters; The New Orleans Review, The New Welsh Review (Wales); The North American Review;

The North Carolina Literary Review; The Notre Dame Review; Outposts (England); The Oxford Magazine; Painted Bride Quarterly; Peace is Our Profession (East River Anthologies); The Plains Poetry Journal; Poetry Daily (http://www.poems.com); Poetry Northwest; Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria); Poetry Today Anthology (Wales); The Potomac Review; The Princeton Arts Review; Prism International (Canada); The Prose Poem (edited by Steve Wilson); Queen’s Quarterly (Canada); Rattle; The Roanoke Review; The Santa Barbara Review; The Seattle Review; The Sewanee Review; The South Carolina Review; The Southern Review; The Southern Humanities Review; The Southern Poetry Review; The Southwest Review; Sparrow; Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society; Stand (England); Tar River Poetry; The Tennessee Quarterly; The Texas Review; Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor (Canada); Verse; The Virginia Quarterly Review; Voices International; Voices Israel (Israel); The Wallace Stevens Journal; WLA: War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities (USAF Academy); The Wascana Review (Canada); The Webster Review; The West Hills Review; Whiskey Island Magazine; The William and Mary Review; The Wisconsin Review; The World of English (China); Writers Forum; The Xavier Review; The Yale Review.

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Cover art-L. Datené

Author photo - Bill Giduz

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Some of the poems included are from the following books:

The Poor Boy and Other Poems, Dragon’s Teeth Press

50 Poems, Hill House New York

Murderer’s Day, Purdue University Press

A Fable and Other Prose Poems, Argonne House Press

This Book is for Patricia, my Partner in Time

I

TRAVELLING CHILD

Night: the rockety-rockety train: the coach filled with sleepers: the moon outside: the passing poles: by, by, by, by: another child: friendship for a day, for an hour like a lifetime: a parting kiss at Kansas City: Why? Why? I loved him. I loved her. The khaki soldiers eating sandwiches: candy butchers: Daddy? Hot. Cold. Night and morning: death: time.

The magical furnished rooms, each new,

alive with new things to know:

closets that could be used for loneliness,

in which one might discover

the artifacts of a previous tenant,

or in which one might create

the lost cave, the bandit den, the jungle,

and, as each of these, the place

to crawl into: sanctuary.

CAMDEN

If I think of night, and factories, and day-bright streets,

I get some of it. The whole town seemed to be a factory full of graveyard-and swing-shifts and vox-populated streets

at all hours, so that one lost track of night and day.

The children of Camden roamed the streets in gangs

composed not so much of juvenile delinquents as of orphaned children looking for something to do, their parents lost to them at Campbell’s Soups or at Lionel Trains,

ground up in the Wheels of Industry. The schools didn’t count,

were apparently attended out of a need to get indoors for a time,

their schedules not fitting the schedules of the factories. Sleepers slept when they could, morning or evening

or night. Meals came when they did, now or later,

morning or evening or night. I drank containered coffee, ate stale chocolate donuts drizzling in wax paper, and huge greasy

restaurant meat-cakes smothered in sour brown gravy.

In winter the snow was black, in summer the air was heavy. There was a constant grinding out of matter, of goods, of people,

but the funereal unreal light made one feel that no matter how much

was made, the making was wages of sin, of death; and the whistles

blew and the sirens sounded and the mobs made their moans.

The white faces were black and the black faces were white,

and everyone seemed to be slow-marching a treadmill to death,

just after the war, once, in Camden, way back when.

COME A CROPPER

They head down in a great slow motion, as if they are galloping into the underworld at some suddenly found entrance, with the amazed boy now riding the underside of the huge, stunned animal, like a ship’s captain on the belly of a ship overturned and about to sink, waiting for rescue, and nothing heard but the horse’s breath, which struggled with the dry hot air, and somewhere inside that enormous exhausted body the great heart finding its rhythm once more.

Thrown

clear, the horrified boy fans his horse with his hat, crying, telling her he didn’t mean to hurt her, telling her he loves her, begging her to rise and be well, finally thinking of the lake and water to throw on her.

Making his way to the lake, he cannot imagine how in a half hour she will rise out of her exhaustion and plant her unsteady hooves under her weight, and he will lead her home, along the shimmering, dusty roads and among the cows in the scrubgrassed fields of the 1940’s dust bowl, limping, and frothy on her flanks, like something from the sea, home to her shady stable, and to the master of the ranch, to explain to such a man, how he has galloped the legs from under such a horse in the noonday sun.

OBITUARY

Edwin Marsh Schorb, Sr. (1893-1963)

Success is counted sweetest By those who ne’er succeed. —Emily Dickinson

Without the mummeries of death, by fire, but not by burning but by breath of smoke, you died like some high god upon his pyre:

0   quick, barbaric, merciful good luck!

1   had so many fears for you, my father;

your ribald binges must have racked your body; I feared some lingering illness, and I’d rather have anything attacking one so bawdy

than an unthrilling, invalided life spent somehow to its end in spite and temper; though there was one thing sterner than its