Lindsey Webb

My desk in early August 2024, so early I hadn't yet flipped the calendar, with its stacks and piles.

Readings

A book of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet and how has that shifted or remained constant for you over time

Louise Glück, The Wild Iris (Ecco Books, 1992)

I recently re-read The Wild Iris for the first time after encountering it more than a decade ago, when I first thought seriously about writing poetry. It was tied, in my memory, to those juvenile poetic experiments, and I wondered if, like listening to music one liked in high school, it just wouldn’t hold up outside of that first encounter. What I found instead was an uncanny mirror to my recent book, Plat, as if I’d had this book open next to me while I wrote mine. (I hadn’t.) God, gardens, and anger — clearly this book had so embedded itself in my poetic brain that I hadn’t even realized I’d been channeling it many years later, long after I’d forgotten the particulars of the book. After reapproaching it, I feel embarrassed that I wondered if I would think it was good, when it was clear it had come to constitute something deeply foundational in me without my knowing. A debt I now acknowledge with full enthusiasm.

A book of poetry from the past five years

Jose Antonio Villarán, Open Pit (Counterpath Press, 2022)

Open Pit is a swirling vortex of a book that orbits pan-American extractive capitalism, with a focus on the Peruvian Andes. At the same time, it also churns under the weight of what it means to write about this subject, especially while standing on United States soil. The book switches itself up, undercuts and rebuilds its own project, questions the reader and itself, while also revealing a sliver of the lives of the miners and community members living under extractivism in the small town of Morococha, Peru. I think difficult subjects are sometimes best approached with self-aware, messy books, books that stretch themselves into unexpected zones and forms. Some books are too neat for their subject matter, too crafted. As someone working on a project about extraction, the size of the subject can feel overwhelming—I want to talk about it all, and don’t know how to. I love the way Open Pit seems to accept its own failure to do something similar, in part because that “failure” allows it to do so many other exciting things. It’s been a rich, useful model as I stumble through my own project.

A work of fiction

Maria Gabriela Llansol, Geography of Rebels Trilogy, trans. Audrey Young (Deep Vellum, 2018)

Some books I leave unfinished out of disinterest, and some I leave unfinished because the experience of reading them feels so intense it can be daunting to pick the book back up and continue. For me, Geography of Rebels is the latter. One day I might finish it, but part of the difficulty is that almost as soon as I pick it back up, within pages, I want to write. In that way, it kicks me out. It has some of the most exciting use of language I’ve encountered in prose; it is also mystic, fragmented, and hermetic. I love this book; I get frustrated by this book; I’m afraid of this book.

Writings

Enker Grene

green here got mulchy
in the heat overnight
the afternoon rainstorms
puddle the leaves with ink
every fiber of the atmosphere
saturated and my neighbor
sets out a dead stump
in the center of the lawn
and hands his daughters
a knife each saying
go on throw as if grene
could be punctured
could be stuck in whose
center could be found
the soft heart of the wood
packed with humid grene
might cave inward at the
impact the way a pile
of grass clippings collapses
under a rock thrown into
its center swallowing it
            the girls
                        stare at their hands full
                        of a blade, the whorls
                         on the stump, the younger pulls
                        back, lets go, a silver whirl

& oueral enker grene
the vert sky in the storm
the mug trembles on the table
when will the wilderness
pull its poison from the point of the prick
green tea the vert very very tea
and the margins fly out
of the mind
                        in the drowned
                        spring, round
                        with dew,
                        green goes aground              

A Cloud, In Theory

tasking the windows
the wind blows
wintering the row
of windows goes
into, then below,

your look, down
to your book, you frown—
shaken by it
I look around
your look, down

to your hands, still
inky from your pen. When
will I tell you I think
there’s a white cloud
inside me, full

of our future yet
not yet a whole?
what storm will
it hold, what form?
and will 

you still love me
if everything changes,
even this still room,
your glove dropping
like a till

into some unknown soil
the window flirts
with blowing in
the night glows
in some momentary birth

and the cloud
billows up at the sound

Lindsey Webb is the author of Plat (Archway Editions, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and the chapbooks Perfumer's Organ (above/ground press) and House (Ghost Proposal). Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Graduate Research Fellow in the Tanner Humanities Center and PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She edits Thirdhand Books. Lindsey was rhizomed to Etcetera by Toby Altman.