The American Poetry Review /Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry

2003 Winner

James McCorkle
for Evidences

Selected by
Jorie Graham

In poems that are by turns lyrical, disjunctive, autobiographical, and political, Evidences sifts through residues of landscape and history. The physicality of the language and the invocation of the world of places and things form a meditative process, essaying the conditions of perception and memory.

"In his introduction to Selected Writings by Charles Olson, Robert Creeley has averred that "history is a literal story, the activity of evidence." In the sobering raptures of this wonderful debut, James McCorkle attends to a very great deal of lucent activity, prospecting among evidence as dark and monumental as that of Anselm Kiefer, as tender and dearly cosmic as the occasion of reading Basho to an impatient daughter. And always, the aftermath of evidence is new creation. As McCorkle shows in "The Hibernaculum, " "The world is always starting." Here, I find much more than a bright beginning and promise. I find Vision. I find delightful consequence."

--Donald Revell, author of Arcady and My Mojave

Estuarine, from Evidences

It would be here, the light soaring
Above the grasses, the flats that stretch 

Across a bay or river gap, here the light
Molten, the birds glints 

Of turned glass, the wash of things
In and out of vision, the water pushing

Out flat, tarnished, tannin seeped, 
It would be here what is as

Abstract as light finds its measure,
Heaping up in weight, the sky

Pressured by its fullness, where everything
Is below surface, below light's press.

The movement of ray and eel-grass
In the outflow, the swarm of transparent

Spawn, ciphers of the next season.
In the silt and mudflows

Toxins graphed, slow spillage
As across an icon, dampness, seepage from 

Gutters, a blistering wall, the blue
Green turning powdery,

Distances obscured, such sacred
Vistas lost now, the birds white

On white, the light pouring down,
What we know hurts us, and 
What isn't known waits. 

Its necessity a geometry of understanding
Each angle's addition.

And light swarms,
The stretch of water could be

Apprehended only as light, the world
As light alone, speechless here

Except that, that single expanse,
Something nothing can penetrate, they said.

James McCorkle lives in Geneva, New York with his wife and two daughters. He received the MFA and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, as well as fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the editor of Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry and the author of The Still Performance, a study of postmodern poetry.

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