The Chime
Cort Day
2002 Norma Farber First Book Award Finalist
The Chime takes as its primary subject the mind’s attempt to situate itself in language. In a word-world of slipped resemblances and deranged categories, it insistently erects a formal dwelling, one haunted by children, icons of old world orders, and by the facts of its author’s life. If Nature is a mirror for the human, it is also an economy. If Love is a vehicle for the soul’s expression, it is also a technology. Mordant, ironic, and reverential, Day’s ten-line poems honor the lyric even as they subvert accepted notions of tone and sensibility, creating an intriguing tension between form and subject. The Chime sounds the semblances, disturbances, losses, and mercurial completions that occur where language vivisects the world. “Post-narrative poetry requires of its makers an extraordinary ear and agility with language: as a storyline emerges, transforms, or disintegrates, only a voice supremely confident can unify what remains. Cort Day’s is one such voice, and The Chime, with its concise, persuasive ten-line poems, offers a world and a mind resonant with wit and music.” “In The Chime, Cort Day has assembled a book-length series of rich and imaginative, ten-line, block-text poems. Day’s poetry functions much like a shoebox diorama: it relies on captivating detail, shadow and the suggestion of character to transcend the physical limitations of form. Should you doubt it, there’s great beauty in smallness, and a great and compelling strangeness to The Chime." "Cort Day dares to make a sound as complex, as immediate, as keen
as its occasion. And the occasion is language moving through and moving with mortality.
These poems are the vocable body of a vivid birth, and I welcome them." "With the prickly sensuality of thistle and the eccentric concentration of the
miniaturist, Cort Day's first book crafts a pixelated music — optical, word perfect,
drop-dead arresting, and ultimately inenarrable. Against the desiccation of our most
potent feelings, The Chime suicides and flowers; it grows a mind." "In response to ‘the contingency of things,’ ‘the heart-stopped
forest,’ the ‘toxic blue garden’ and the sheer uncanniness of the
quotidian, Cort Day has produced a work of transgressive imaginings, calls and responses,
chimes and echoes. It is a work by turns humorous and darkly erotic, where the ships of
reason burn on an ocean tuned to an open frequency. That ocean is poetic speech, drowning
the reality principle in its surges and its
deeps."
—The Antioch Review
—American Letters and Commentary
—Donald
Revell
—C.
D. Wright
—Michael Palmer
about the author
Cort Day’s work has appeared in many reviews and journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, and Jubilat. He teaches poetry at the New School, and lives in New York City.
Author photo by Kate Egan
