{"id":53582,"date":"2020-04-07T10:09:50","date_gmt":"2020-04-07T16:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=53582"},"modified":"2023-11-13T13:54:17","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T19:54:17","slug":"rob-carney-reads-facts-3-4-5-6-and-scott-pooles-the-tinder-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/rob-carney-reads-facts-3-4-5-6-and-scott-pooles-the-tinder-box\/","title":{"rendered":"Rob Carney Reads “Facts 3, 4, 5, 6” and Scott Poole’s “The Tinder Box”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In honor of National Poetry Month, we’ve asked poets in our state to read from their own work as well as from the work of a poet they admire.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rob Carney<\/a>\u00a0is the author of six books and three chapbooks of poems, most recently Facts and Figures <\/em>(2020). The Book of Sharks<\/em><\/a> won the 2019 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry. He is the winner of the 2013 Terrain.org Poetry Prize and the 2014 Robinson Jeffers\/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, Mid-American Review, and many other journals, as well as Flash Fiction Forward (Norton 2006). He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City.<\/h4>\n

Carney sent us a few options from his newest collection, Facts and Figures<\/em>. We asked him to read “Facts 3, 4, 5, 6” because, it seems, we all are feeling a little homesick, for the way things used to be.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rob Carney reads his poem “Facts 3, 4, 5, 6”<\/h4>\n\nhttp:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/Facts3-6.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fact 3<\/p>\n

I was a spelling tutor once for three Arab guys\u2014Mohammed, Muhammed, and Khalid. We\u2019d meet and I\u2019d agree that it\u2019s a pitchfork curse, that zoo<\/em>, blue<\/em>, shoe<\/em>, through<\/em>, view<\/em> and two<\/em> shouldn\u2019t rhyme; that heart<\/em> with part<\/em>, and haunt<\/em> with want<\/em>, and reign<\/em> with brain<\/em> were insane\u2014and then we\u2019d go shoot pool. Muhammed was the best at it, an extrovert, always smiling, so on the day he said he didn\u2019t want to, I could tell that he was feeling down. \u201cI miss camels,\u201d he said. \u201cHere there are only cows.\u201d To hell with idioms. He\u2019d hit on a better way to say, \u201cI\u2019m homesick.\u201d And right now, sitting in my house, I\u2019m homesick too. Not for camels, for water.<\/p>\n

Fact 4<\/p>\n

Astrology tells me there\u2019s a reason for this. My zodiac sign is the Crab, and I\u2019m landlocked. Four-thousand feet above sea level. Utah. But just like with spelling\u2014an e<\/em> on the end makes the vowel sound long, but not in the case of the number \u201cone\u201d\u2014there must be exceptions. I mean, somewhere there\u2019s bound to be a Taurus (Earth sign) who totally lives to water ski, or a Virgo (another Earth sign) who up and buys a kayak in her thirties, turns herself halfway into an otter, even inventing new coves in her sleep, and new woods with accessible places to launch from. One night she finds her arms moving under the blankets, enough that she wakes herself up: It\u2019s the middle of the night, it\u2019s her bedroom, and the nearly fluid sunlight cutting through the overcast was just a dream. The sound of her paddle dipping, dipping, dipping in the lake was just rain outside getting scooped at her house by wind gusts. The weather and her limbs tuned and rhythmic. Liquid whispers.<\/p>\n

Fact 5<\/p>\n

Water: Mix it with grain and time, you get whiskey; with pigment and talent, you get art; with salt, and now you have a home for orcas. Mix it with imagining and memory, and I don\u2019t feel quite so homesick anymore.<\/p>\n

Fact 6<\/p>\n

How do you spell \u201ckayaker\u201d? W-a-t-e-r.<\/p>\n

How do you spell \u201chypnotic\u201d? W-a-t-e-r.<\/p>\n

How do you spell \u201cwant\u201d and \u201cheart\u201d and \u201crain\u201d? W-a-t-e-r.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Looking outside his own work, Carney opted to read from the work of Scott Poole.<\/h4>\n

“I like so much of Scott Poole’s work and have since I met him in Spokane 20 years ago,” Carney says. “But I’m choosing ‘The Tinder Box’ because I like its quick and escalating logic and imagery and voice, and because it’s so human. It’s telling us that the mind is the best fire, and it came before the others. That’s always worth remembering, I think.”<\/h4>\n

\u00a0Rob Carney reads Scott Poole’s “The Tinder Box”:<\/h4>\nhttp:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/TheTinderBox-ScottPoole.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

 <\/p>\n

Carney also chose “The Tinder Box” because he and Poole have a book of their new work coming out in August. It’s called\u00a0The Last Tiger Is Somewhere, <\/i>published by Portland indie press\u00a0<\/i>Unsolicited Press. The book features poems by each that respond to the news, along with a short introduction by Carney and a short afterword by Poole.<\/h4>\n

Carney’s “Hansel and Gretel” is one you’ll find in the forthcoming book.<\/h4>\n
\nhttp:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/\u2022HanselAndGretel.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In honor of National Poetry Month, we’ve asked poets in our state to read from their own work as well as from the work of a poet they admire.\u00a0\u00a0   Rob Carney\u00a0is the author of six books and three chapbooks of poems, most recently Facts and Figures (2020). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53588,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3702],"tags":[2751],"class_list":["post-53582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literary-arts","category-poets-in-pajamas","tag-rob-carney"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/RobCarney.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-06 03:01:09","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53582"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70683,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53582\/revisions\/70683"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}