The House with Only an Attic and a Basement Read online

  When there was time he wrote poems;

  when he didn’t have ideas he practised

  writing in dialects he had little

  familiarity with. Soon hell was filled

  with his scribblings wafting from circle

  to circle in ascending order, then

  burning in the furnace (which indeed

  was fuelled by his wife) and wafting

  away again in their final form, as ash.

  Catherine and Her Wheel (III)

  When my teachers grew old and died, when my friends

  went sparer and sparer, when small islands suffered

  from the New Weather, when my children found me

  offensively morbid, when my looks officially went,

  when my enemies became friends became rivals became

  allies became masters became servants until we lacked

  energy for anything even escape from our celebrated

  cities whose skylines transitioned from greatness to perfect

  meaninglessness as when a person loses her mind

  like my cohorts who were going crazier and crazier until

  I wondered Is this sensitive ageing? What the fuck

  is going on here? … I knew nothing, and the nothing I knew

  was more profoundly nothing even than the nothing

  we know at our rarest bottommost humblest moments

  because usually we know one thing – we know

  we’re not dead or that ‘apple’ has a feminine article in French,

  but this was absolute zero like when the saint fell off a horse

  then into a coma then woke up and said to another saint

  that there was nothing, that there was ‘nada de nada’,

  the most perfect Spanish expression, the most beautiful

  and poetic circle, the nothing wheel,

  the wheel I have carried through all routes of my life, the wheel

  I was fundamentally wedded to, my true beloved,

  watch me touch it now look at it look at it: nothing.

  Notes and Attributions

  ‘ABC’ borrows phrases from Sigmund Freud.

  ‘DAWN CHORUS in the style of the Medea, with Haiku’ is particularly indebted to Rachel Cusk’s version of Medea.

  The rhyming text in ‘Scarlet Letter Couplets’ is derived from rearranged passages in Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; the text from the Ashley Madison couplets was found on the Ashley Madison website in 2016.

  ‘Dear Fellow Parents’ and ‘Here Is the Official Line on Attire’ are edited versions of emails by Madeleine Plaut.

  ‘Ladies’ Voices’ is modelled after a Gertrude Stein playlet by the same name; the overheard voices are from a WhatsApp group.

  ‘How to be a Dream Girl not a Doormat about the “Ex” ’ borrows the ‘Dream Girl’ versus ‘Doormat’ concept from Sherry Argov’s Why Men Love Bitches, and repurposes some of Argov’s phrases.

  ‘Ooga-Booga Cento’ is made from lines from Frederick Seidel’s Ooga-Booga.

  ‘Object’ contains a short phrase by Sigmund Freud, another by Marianne Moore, and another from the First Epistle of Peter.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to the editors of these journals, anthologies, etc. for publishing poems in this collection: 3am magazine, Agenda, Bristow (artist catalogue for Adel Abdessemed), Fence, Granta, Magma, The Nation, The New Statesman, Penguin Modern Poets 5, Ploughshares, Poems in Which, Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Swimmers, tender, Test Centre 8, The Best British Poetry 2015, The Forward Book of Poetry 2017, The Poetry Review, Traverse Poetry Trading Cards (Stonewood Press), BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, and Writing Motherhood (Seren). Other poems appeared in a pamphlet, 2008, edited by Sam Riviere of If a Leaf Falls Press.

  Thank you to my editor Donald Futers of Penguin UK; and to Harriet Moore of David Higham Associates.

  Thank you to editors, friends and curators for commissions: Rachael Allen, Hannah Barry, Sophie Collins, Juliette Desorgues (the ICA), S. J. Fowler, Jacqueline Gabbitas, Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Martin Parker, and especially Edward Doegar, whose assignment on behalf of The Poetry Society and The British Museum resulted in ‘The House with Only an Attic and a Basement’ and, ultimately, this book.

  Thank you to friends, colleagues, students, supervisors and others who offered editorial help, inspiration, friendship or support, especially Nuar Alsadir, Katherine Angel, Louise Bangay, Simon Barraclough, Emily Berry, Kate Bingham, Frederic N. Busch, John Canfield, Gerry Cambridge, Jessica Clark, Geraldine Clarkson, Josh Cohen, Cathleen Allyn Conway, Sasha Dugdale, Linda Gregerson, Catherine Hamilton, Vera Iliatova, Phil Hancock, Emily Hasler, Martha Kapos, Amy Key, Suki Kim, Sunny Kim, Phillis Levin, Patrick Mackie, Jamie McKendrick, Melissa Ozawa, Rebecca Perry, Rachel Piercey, Mischa Foster Poole, Neville Purssell, Declan Ryan, Don Share, Kathryn Simmonds, Tom Sleigh, Dorota Sowala-Roshdy, Martha Sprackland, George Szirtes, The Poetry School, Jack Underwood, Megan Virtue, Estela V. Welldon, Matthew Welton, Aime Williams, Chrissy Williams and Hugo Williams.

  Love and particular thanks to my family for tolerating apparent likenesses between themselves and certain characters in these fictions; and also to Maurice Riordan, who helped with every aspect of this book.

  THE BEGINNING

  Let the conversation begin …

  Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinUKbooks

  Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks

  Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest

  Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/penguinbooks

  Listen to Penguin at SoundCloud.com/penguin-books

  Find out more about the author and

  discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.uk

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

  India | New Zealand | South Africa

  Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published 2018

  Copyright © Kathryn Maris, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Cover images: Getty Images

  Cover design: Richard Green

  ISBN: 978-0-141-98658-6

 

 

  Kathryn Maris, The House with Only an Attic and a Basement

 

 

  Thank you for reading books on Archive.BookFrom.Net
Share this book with friends