Village Poets of Sunland Tujunga present a distinguished poet from Phoenix, Arizona, David Chorlton, author of 14 books of poetry, 23 chapbooks, several edited volumes and poems published in over 250 journals. The reading will have a hybrid "live/Zoom" format, at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga, CA, on Sunday, September 26, 2021 at 4:30 pm.
The venue welcomes guests in masks. There is no return to our enjoyable receptions, though: we cannot have shared food for the intermission/reception - only single servings, individual bottles of water, packages of raisins, are allowed under the new rules of the Museum. Located at 10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, CA 91042, the Bolton Hall Museum is owned by the City of Los Angeles as its historic Landmark no. 13; and operated by the Little Landers Society.
The featured poet will visit the venue virtually, from his Phoenix, AZ, home, using Zoom. Email DMHSkiles@gmail.com or Maja@moonrisepress.com for the Zoom invitation. There will be a screen and projector at Bolton Hall for the Zoom visitors.
DAVID CHORLTON
From Poets & Writers: "I live with a European past, replete with memories of art galleries plus a love of music, and a present rooted on the Southwest desert. Most of my learning has come from reading across a broad spectrum of poetry, and my writing has edged a little more toward the natural world as "nature poetry" no longer has the reassuring and bucolic implications it had when I was at school. Readings are always a special events for me, and I'd go so far as saying that a poem read aloud is in its final draft."
He is the author of 14 books and 23 chapbooks listed below. Poems have appeared in more than 250 literary magazines in print, including: Abraxas, The Bitter Oleander, Bloomsbury Review, Buckle &, Chiron Review, Contact II, Cumberland Poetry Review, The Devil’s Millhopper, Heaven Bone, Hawaii Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, The MacGuffin, Main Street Rag, Mississippi Mud, New Mexico Humanities Review, The Other Side, Pembroke Magazine, Poet Lore, Skidrow Penthouse, Slipstream, Webster Review. Online magazine publications include: The Adirondack Review, Ascent, Canary, Cutthroat, The New Verse News, Stride, Three Candles, Versewrights, Voices on the Wind,
Appearances in Anthologies include: Arizona Anthem (Mnemosyne Press); Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry; Crossing the River - Poets of the Western U.S. (Permanent Press); Fever Dreams (U. of Arizona); Open Door (Poet Lore); Prayers for a Thousand Years (HarperSanFrancisco); Fresh Water, Prayers to Protest, Glass Works (Pudding House); To Life, Always the Beautiful Answer (Kings Estate Press); The British Museum BIRDS (The British Museum Press), New Poets of the American West (Many Voices Press); Entanglements (eco anthology from Two Ravens Press, Scotland)
Poetry Books
2021 Unmapped Worlds (FutureCycle Press)
2020 Speech Scroll (Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library)
Review by Alice Pero is included in CSPS Poetry Letter No. 3, 2021
2018 Reading T. S. Eliot to a Bird (Hoot’n Waddle)
2017 Bird on a Wire (Presa Press)
2015 A Field Guide to Fire (FutureCycle Press)
2014 Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press)
2012 The Devil's Sonata (FutureCycle Press)
2007 The Porous Desert (Future Cycle Press)
2006 Waiting for the Quetzal (March Street Press)
2004 Return to Waking Life (Main Street Rag Publishing Company)
2003 A Normal Day Amazes Us (Kings Estate Press)
1994 Outposts (Taxus Press, UK)
1992 Forget the Country You Came From (Singular Street Press)
1978 Corn Dance (Europaeischer Verlag, Vienna, Austria)
Chapbooks
2021 The Inner Mountain (Poems & paintings, Cholla Needles Art & Literary Library)
2009 From the Age of Miracles (Slipstream Chapbook Contest Winner)
2008 The Lost River (Rain Mountain Press – Winner off the Ronald Wardall Poetry Prize)
2008 The Epistemological Question Mark (March Street Press – extended version of 1994 original)
2006 Places You Can’t Reach (Pudding House Chapbook Contest Winner)
2005 Another Word (Pudding House Publications)
2001 Common Sightings (Palanquin Press Chapbook Contest winner)
2000 Greatest Hits 1980 – 2000 (Pudding House Publications))
2000 Assimilation (Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest winner)
1998 Wolkenstein (Words and Spaces)
1997 Getting Across (Modest Proposal)
1997 Country of Two Seasons (Pudding House Chapbook Contest winner)
1996 Madera Canyon Notebook (Brushfire)
1994 The Insomniacs (Slipstream Chapbook Contest winner)
1993 The Human Flower (Trout Creek Press)
1992 Straw Bones (Beginner’s Mind)
1992 Wear This Country as a Stolen Coat (Brushfire)
1990 Measuring Time (Trout Creek Press)
1990 The Village Painters (Adastra Press)
1987 Without Shoes (American Studies Press)
1987 Urgent Lives (Pamphlet from Suburban Wilderness Press)
1986 The Skin Beneath (M. A. F. Press)
1984 Allegiance to the Fire (Bragdon Books)
Co-Editor
2012 American Society: What Poets See (FutureCycle Press)
2015 Weatherings (FutureCycle Press)
Online Chapbooks
2013 The Chiricahuas (Seven Circle Press)
2008 Melancholy’s Architecture (Slow Trains) http://www.slowtrains.com/vol7issue4/melancholycover.html
2008 The Interior (Island Hills Books) http://islandhills.tripod.com/chorlton.pdf
2008 Dry Heat (Origami Condom) http://www.origamicondom.org/Chapbooks/DChorlton.01.pdf
2008 The Dreaming House (Chippens) http://www.chippens.com/chapbooks/The_Dreaming_House.pdf
Translations
2017 Shatter the Bell in my Ear, Christine Lavant (The Bitter Oleander Press)
2008 Elis Dances, Hans Raimund (Online chapbook at Chippens Press)
1997 Viennese Ventriloquies, Prose by Hans Raimund (Event Horizon Press)
1993 Hardly the Blink of an Eye, Poems and prose by Hans Raimund (Words and Spaces)
Poems available on the web, there has been a range of them at Verse-Virtual:
http://www.verse-virtual.com/apps/search?q=David+Chorlton
More appeared in the Amethyst Review:
https://amethystmagazine.org/?s=David+Chorlton
The Deep Frozen Desert
Beneath the ice light of the northern sky
in a mountain six hundred miles
from the nearest tree,
where frost runs deep into stone
and the only star is a signal
from a disappeared world
the seeds of a desert go along
the blue tunnel for storage
in a vault where they wait
for springtime to flower
from snowdrift and memory.
Here is mesquite and a crystal
of cold to preserve it; here
are prickly pear and sage
held in trust for the day
when the sun reappears; here
are agave and ironwood labeled
with ink that glows in the dark
like each golden segment
in the scorpion’s tail
and the hourglass of fire
on the spider who crawls
between the stacks
of silver packages bearing
the indestructible seal
of night-blooming hope.
The Bat God
With wings of silk and a velvet mask
he hangs in a recess
until the dark is thick enough to stir
then the blood flows faster
to his ears
and they open to receive the music
made by stars. He’s a memory
that can’t find a way
back into the mind. Imagine a wolf’s heart
shrunken to fit
inside a tiny breast; imagine
a flame as a tooth. When you wake up
in the small hours
thirsty for light
and reach for the switch he’ll be there,
he’ll be silence
with an edge so sharp
it cuts. Imagine navigating
fear with a map you can touch
but not see; imagine
your reflection flying
from the mirror
and never coming back.
Cheap Mangos
There’s an easy flow of music through
the speakers at the supermercado
where papayas ripen while you watch
their skins disintegrate
the way a man’s skin does
when he’s found on his back in the desert
facing the sun with his mouth locked
between a scream and a prayer. His trouser leg
is torn where a coyote
came to gnaw at his thigh
and of his right forearm only
the bones remain, while on his left wrist
a watch still measures time.
The music has a teardrop in its beat
and nostalgia in the singer’s voice
but the juice aisle is a happy place
with any flavour you’d remember
from a trip across the border
going south to a colourful village
with peppers stacked in the market
just like these red, green, yellow ones
displayed in the order of their bite,
a village likely similar
to one the woman left
whose sweater clings to what remains
of her where she collapsed
in a pair of sports shoes good for many
more miles with the tread on their soles
and Just Do It style. Something pulled at her hair
where her scalp peeled away
but the strap on her brassiere
is indestructible as the belt
that falls slack where the flesh has wasted
from her hips. Had she made it
to a road she might have found
her way to Phoenix, to the store
where the cakes in the cold case
are churrigueresque, and mangos
are two for ninety-nine cents.
Sections from a recent long poem, Speech Scroll
(62)
A ringtail climbs down from the stars
to the edge of a roof
where he finds
a wooden beam extending
to a hook on which
a glass hangs
filled with earthly sweetness. He makes
of his body a question mark
that asks for truths
only known among animals. He’s
agile and can balance
on a breath, right side up or
upside down, with a universe
of sound compressed
inside his ears, and eyes only
for night, when the galaxies
above him are thick enough
to stir with his tail.
(67)
The forecast is for wind
to stir up lies and scatter them
for the birds to take. Goldfinches
pick up the smallest, the ones
the television tells. Doves arrive in number
pecking at the ground for the remnants
of the last political campaign
and they are never full. A flicker
works the grass, pulling out
the details of the latest cures
for conditions so pre-
existing they haven’t yet been seen,
while grackles attack
what the car dealers call
a good offer. They tear apart
the papers and fly
away, each with a salesman’s smile
drooping from its beak.
(119)
At four AM it’s time
to dust the moonlight from the rooftops
and polish the surface
of the pond. The hummingbirds
jump-start their hearts
and the thrashers grip the cactus
where they call whit-whit
above the rustle quail make
on the ground. The powerful awake
refreshed and put on
their boldest faces for the early
news: clean-shaven, hair
frozen into place, jaws
rolling underneath
each word they speak, while the gears
inside the Earth cry out
for oil and human kindness
to keep it turning.
Photos from California and Arizona by Maja Trochimczyk
