#chase twichell

[honeybeebutch]

Kill your nostalgia.

The Blade of Nostalgia - Chase Twichell // Goodnight Punpun - Inio Asano // The Opposite of Nostalgia - Eric Gamalinda // Landscape (1907) - Henri Matisse // Happy Days - Closure in Moscow // Nostalgia - Peter Viereck // The Bedroom - Vincent Van Gogh // Nostalgia - Karl J. Shapiro // El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)

[poem-today]

A poem by Chase Twichell

Saint Animal

Suddenly it was clear to me - I was something I hadn't been before. It was as if the animal part of my being

had reached some kind of maturity that gave it authority, and had begun to use it.

I thought about death for two years. My animal flailed and tore at its cage till I let it go. I watched it

drift out into the easy eddies of twilight and then veer off, not knowing me.

I'm not a bird but I'm inhabited by a spirit that's uplifting me. It's my animal, my saint and soldier, my flame of yearning,

come back to tell me what it was like to be without me.

Chase Twichell

Listen to Chase Twichell read her poem.

[warlockofagnesi]

Chase Twichell, in honor of our first real snow of the season.

[charmingpplincardigans]

They think I'm like, really hot. They've said so several times, and I'm just. At a loss I think, for lack of any understanding.

I'm aware other people have found me attractive, wanted to kiss me, etc. But I've never felt it before. Never let myself near it because attraction lives very frequently in the body and my body was not something that belonged to me. It has belonged to so many other people, but never to me.

I think about catching sight of myself in a night darkened window and bursting into tears over how ugly I was. How John was at a loss as to what to do with my self-loathing.

I think about Sara, crawling into my lap on a hotel bed, pushing me down and kissing me in front of her friends as I stroked her back and told her I loved her. Because I did, but I wouldn't let myself believe I could have her, for so many reasons.

I think about all of the times I have decided for other people that they deserve better than me, because what do I have to offer anyway? I can be charming sure, but the shine always wears off.

I think about how I've never once believed someone when they told me I was hot, but somehow I believe this them? Not just that I believe they think I'm hot for some strange reason, but that I can feel it growing warm inside of me. They think I'm hot, and I believe I can be.

I know that a lot of that is ten years of becoming and of therapy and of inching ever closer to myself very slowly, as if I'm a horse I don't want to startle.

I think about the time I told a professor I thought the Chase Twichell poem Horse was about internal vs external perception and he told me I was wrong.

I think about Horse, by Chase Twichell:

I’ve never seen a soul detached from its gender,

but I’d like to. I’d like to see my own that way,

free of its female tethers. Maybe it would be like

riding a horse. The rider’s the human one,

but everyone looks at the horse.

When we were loitering in the Harvard Book Store this past weekend I picked up a used copy of a book of Chase Twichell's poems. Horse wasn't in it, but it felt a bit full circle anyway.

There are so many ways I wasn't prepared for this, even as I invited it into my life. There are so many ways I want to be right for it, want it to work out, don't want to drag it down with all of the heavy pieces of me that have capsized my relationships from before.

But they think I'm like, really hot, and I believe them, and for some reason that makes everything just a little bit lighter.

[ukdamo]

Monastery Nights

Chase Twichell

I like to think about the monastery as I’m falling asleep, so that it comes and goes in my mind like a screen saver. I conjure the lake of the zendo, rows of dark boats still unless someone coughs or otherwise ripples the calm. I can hear the four AM slipperiness of sleeping bags as people turn over in their bunks. The ancient bells.

When I was first falling in love with Zen, I burned incense called Kyonishiki, “Kyoto Autumn Leaves,” made by the Shoyeido Incense Company, Kyoto, Japan. To me it smelled like earnestness and ether, and I tried to imagine a consciousness ignorant of me. I just now lit a stick of it. I had to run downstairs for some rice to hold it upright in its bowl, which had been empty for a while, a raku bowl with two fingerprints in the clay. It calls up the monastery gate, the massive door demanding I recommit myself in the moments of both its opening and its closing, its weight now mine, I wanted to know what I was, and thought I could find the truth where the floor hurts the knee.

I understand no one I consider to be religious. I have no idea what’s meant when someone says they’ve been intimate with a higher power. I seem to have been born without a god receptor. I have fervour but seem to lack even the basic instincts of the many seekers, mostly men, I knew in the monastery, sitting zazen all night, wearing their robes to near-rags boy-stitched back together with unmatched thread, smoothed over their laps and tucked under, unmoving in the long silence, the field of grain ripening, heavy tasselled, field of sentient beings turned toward candles, flowers, the Buddha gleaming like a vivid little sports car from his niche.

What is the mind that precedes any sense we could possibly have of ourselves, the mind of self-ignorance? I thought that the divestiture of self could be likened to the divestiture of words, but I was wrong. It’s not the same work. One’s a transparency and one’s an emptiness.

Kyonishiki…. Today I’m painting what Mom calls no-colours, greys and browns, evergreens: what’s left of the woods when autumn’s come and gone. And though he died, Dad’s here, still forgetting he’s no longer married to Annie, that his own mother is dead, that he no longer owns a car. I told them not to make any trouble or I’d send them both home. Surprise half inch of snow. What good are words?

And what about birches in moonlight, Russell handing me the year’s first chanterelle— Shouldn’t God feel like that?

I aspire to “a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration,” as Elizabeth Bishop put it. So who shall I say I am? I’m a prism, an expressive temporary sentience, a pinecone falling. I can hear my teacher saying, No. That misses it. Buddha goes on sitting through the century, leaving me alone in the front hall, which has just been cleaned and smells of pine.

[thiefree]

I wonder a lot whether it would change my understanding of myself to learn that I am intersex.

[bildungsromanx]

There’s so many poems I enjoyed last year (2023) here they are in a list in no particular order:

Morning Love Poem // Tara Skurtu

À la recherche d’ Gertrude Stein” // Frank O’Hara

For Once, Then, Something // Robert Frost

Animal Languages // Chase Twichell

The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee // N.Scott Momaday

This untitled Ava Wolf poem

Clear Morning // Louise Glück

Defining the Problem // Wendy Cope

After the Movie // Marie Howe

Search History Sad // Caylin Capra-Thom

February & my love is in another state //José Olivarez

P.S. there were plenty of other things I found to be poetic that aren’t traditional modes of poetry. For instance the interview with James Baldwin and Giovanni, paintings, this YouTube video on Odilon Redon, found objects, infographics, etc.

I can’t leave these out. Quotes. Honorable mention for the Jeremy Radin one.

[almanarjournalcultural]

مقبلات الموت:  تشيس تويتشل

ترجمة : د.محمد عبدالحليم غنيم سرب من الأسماك الرمادية الميتة يطفوأمام عيني  — يطفو. لا ردود تأتي عندما أنادي. هل هذا ما ستكون عليه الشيخوخة؟لا، هذه هي الشيخوخة الآن. أحب أن آخذ رشفات صغيرة من الرعب،لقيمات من اللحم المسموم، كل مذاقٍ تمهيدٌ للمذاق المقبل. أستعد للألم القادم، ليس هذا الألم.تلك هي الكذبة التي أخدع بها نفسي. =========== الشاعرة : تشيس تويتشل/  Chase Twichell  : (وُلدت في 20…

[whisperthatruns]

Roadkill

I want to see things as they are without me. Why, I don’t know.

As a kid I always looked at roadkill close up, and poked a stick into it. I want to look at death

with eyes like my own baby eyes, not yet blinded by knowledge.

I told this to my friend the monk, and he said, Want, want, want.

Chase Twichell, text from Sean Singer’s daily email, The Sharpener

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Art: "In Search of the Center", 1997. Anonymous Tantra painting from the Rajasthan region of India.

* * * *

A rift opened in the world, and guess what was on the other side? The world. That’s tonight’s poem: nothing but a small sudden understanding. Nothing permanent. Read the full version of Chase Twichell's final Monday poem for the Tricycle blog, "After Snow."

[derangedrhythms]

Chase Twichell, The Snow Watcher; from 'Saint Animal'

TEXT ID: my flame of yearning, come back to tell me what it was like to be without me.

[elizabethanism]

Chase Twichell:

[the-final-sentence]

You can’t translate something that was never in a language in the first place.

Chase Twichell, from “Downstairs in Dreams”

[eelhound]

“[Chase Twichell:] You’ve said that you were once a poet who practiced Zen but over the years became a monk who practices poetry. Could you say more about this?

[Seido Ray Ronci:] My interest in Zen started in high school, but it wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I learned how to meditate. It was then that I met my teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi. I vividly remember my first sanzen [private interview] with him. He asked me, ‘What do you do?’ I stupidly replied, ‘I’m a poet.’ He laughed, rang his bell to dismiss me, and said, ‘You’ll never be a poet.’ Soon after this exchange, Sasaki Roshi gave me a koan that took me several months to answer. When I did finally answer it — without the use of any words — he said, ‘Now you become poet!’

For me, poetry has always been a practice in and of itself. It’s not only the practice of using language — it’s also the practice of being aware: of using all the senses and being absorbed by each moment. Zen practice is always about returning to that place where there are no words. Early on, I realized that to use words, you have to live life beyond words, before words, without words. Only then do you have the right to speak.

This is why I say that I used to be a poet who practiced sitting meditation and then became a monk who practiced poetry — poetry is that initial step away from the deep absorption that comes from sitting for long periods of meditation. It’s only when you realize that language is secondary, a step removed, that you begin to make poems.”

-  Chase Twichell, from “No Words”

[poem-today]

A poem by Chase Twichell

A Negative of Snow

Ice on the puddles, in the cups of fallen leaves. I’d walk with Dad and a handful of other men, the setters working the fields, the underbrush. It was my job to carry the birds. I’d have them all plucked by the time we got back to the car. On the walk out I’d look for puddles I’d missed and break them. Though many moonless nights have fallen on the grave like a negative of snow, Dad’s wheelchair sometimes flashes in my mind, and I hear the bleating down the hall, a voice berating its god, his worthless anodynes, and the doctors who were at that very moment increasing his morphine, having failed to note the word alcoholic on his chart, meaning that his damaged liver routed the opiates straight to his brain, his beautiful fragile brain, which I had not yet finished loving. My father, who still had manners, who was a hardwood, a tough tree. That was his first death.

Chase Twichell Listen to Chase Twichell read the poem.