Free Clean Fill Dirt: poems

By Caryl Pagel

Free Clean Fill Dirt, Caryl Pagel's third book of poetry, is a study in disruption, interruption, and ruin, tracing geological and historical palimpsests via caesura, fragmentation, echo, and humor. In these rigorous, formally adventurous poems Pagel calls upon the playful, unsettling sonic sensibilities of writers such as Lorine Niedecker, Russell Atkins, Frank O'Hara, and H. D., as she ties the music of place to personal inquiry: “There is / something in the way / of the thought,” the narrator posits: is it sound, desire, violence, or image? Pagel dwells in the anti-ordinary ordinary strata of Midwestern mythologies, emergencies, landscapes, and crises. Using a blend of ecopoetic, visual, and archival modes, Free Clean Fill Dirt is a collection of poems making intimacy of deep time and vanitas of vision.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781629221472

Caryl Pagel

Caryl Pagel is the author of two previous books of poetry, Twice Told and Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death, as well as a collection of essays, Out of Nowhere Into Nothing. She is an editor and publisher at Rescue Press and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Pagel teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program.

Book preview

SEVERANCE CENTER

Is that part

of the stem—the

one that bends—

around the pole—stood

there now decades

ago—the stem that

mended obstruction by

humbly arounding—shooting through

it—is it

then—that stem—evidence—

of memory or

an antenna?Alien force

for sure tasked

to twist about the

ruin of what’s

been reckless (this city’s

past’s past’s making)—

growth a mark of

unreasonable season—growth

showing where a wild

coyote walked kingly

down the street at

dawnNoWait

wild is wrongYou

didn’t see it

There can’t be any

longer wildWild

is the one that

lives inside watching

from the window what

is wilder still

than him—with vigilance

You touch him

thinking most creatures can’t

believe can’t recall

their own beginningEnds

we witness—but

that stem started long

before you thought

to meet it—and

around it bends—

born in cementHave

you put a

face to your enemy?

Have you sat

in séance?Have you

asked your dead

what way yet?Have

you finished accounting?

Will you pack your

belongings?Would you

ever even do that?

What would you

do?H.D. said "we

look through a

window into the world

of pure over-mind"

and—like a