Internal Blue
Speculative Friction
by Claire Bateman
GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—4/18/11— “For all things are made also of what resists them. Otherwise each Atlantic wave, incoming, might spread over the prairies like a sky, and never stopping,
meet the Pacific, or each single, barely perceptible spore of a fern might suddenly unfold over us a green map the size of the world.
…
…Otherwise, all stories are equally true and there is no success or failure, heroism or shame, no love some other story won’t undo. Otherwise nothing is left to the imagination, otherwise there is no otherwise.”
—from “How Things Are: A Suite for Lucretians” by James Richardson, from his collection, How Things Are
Claire Bateman
Claire Bateman’s books include Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose); Locals (Serving House Books), The Bicycle Slow Race (Wesleyan University Press), Friction (Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), At The Funeral Of The Ether (Ninety-Six Press, Furman University), Clumsy (New Issues Poetry & Prose), Leap (New Issues), and Coronology (Etruscan Press). She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Writings 40th Anniversary Poetry Prize. She has taught at Clemson University, the Greenville Fine Arts Center, and various workshops and conferences such as Bread Loaf and Mount Holyoke. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina. (Please see Bateman’s amazon.com Author’s Page for links to all her publications, and go here for further information about the poet and her work.) (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)