The House with Only an Attic and a Basement Page 4
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
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PENGUIN BOOKS
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
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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
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