Kingfisher

Author: Matthew Goulish

Publisher: Both Are Worse (2024)

The dramaturg, writer, and teacher Matthew Goulish reflects on the practice of reading poetry, of reading just one poem: ‘Kingfisher’ by Ed Roberson. How to attend, to follow the course of the poem as a waterway, to recognise in its surface tension impending drops, hidden obstacles, and disguised turns? How also and at the same time to attend to an interruption – an accidental sighting – with equal curiosity? Sincerity follows the lines of the poem inside and outside, inward and outward, drawing in a series of correspondences and correspondents, roots and sources, until reading becomes a collective endeavor; the words of Ed Roberson, Michelle Sherburne, Renee Gladman, and Lyn Hejinian are also here. As the subject of this particular poem surfaces, to catch a glimpse is not so obviously a gift: the practice of catching sight might also be injurious to another’s freedom. And so we follow the trail of the poem through Smuggler’s Notch.