Gospel (“the good news”).
……………….

Today the good news is that Claudia Keelan will be in Tuscaloosa during the spring of 2011 as a visiting professor at the University of Alabama, and this is the first of several (forthcoming) reminders that now is the right time to begin to seek companionship in her poems. Finishing her new book Missing Her (New Issues 2009) Saturday morning at the Ashe County Farmers Market in West Jefferson, North Carolina, surrounded by gorgeous vegetables, flowers, BBQ, delicious baked goods, cheeses, and wonderful handmade quilts, it struck me again that it is hard to come by poems that are more heartfelt and bluntly earnest in their attentions. Cleaving to “dear life, where we are all in time together,” Keelan is deeply committed to a salvation that speeds towards the wreckage of salvation, to the ecstasy of contact with the world and with others (community!) and to the transformational potential of loss (“Ecstatic Émigré”).

Here’s a link to the first installment of her expansive, amazingly energetic APR column “Ecstatic Émigré”: http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_keelan.php

And a breathtaking poem from Missing Her, “Pity Boat”:

I would not blow
         Into the tube
Of the life vest
Not in English
Nyet in Spanish
There were far too many ways to drown
Flying over Texas

        So I’m lying
Next to William Blake
In a big rubber raft
& he’s teaching me how to love
Being dead. A slow study,
I fling my arms
After every cactus we pass.
“You’re dumb, Claudia,” Blake says.
“I am not,” I say and poke
Poor William Blake
With a gun.
William Blake is beyond asking why.
And since the many and/or the few
Fuck everyone and/or thing they can
& since to fuck is to hit with a club,
He moved to Paradise.
I drive each day
Down Paradise Road
& one day I saw myself there.
I was 11 and I was crying
Running home through eucalyptus
To the El Granada motel.
Those trees knew the future,
Sweet tan bark
Shedding perpetually
In the salty air.
William Blake stretches out,
Happily naked and dead
In the what’s next.
He’s singing a song behind my eyelids
Somebody knows where we’re going
William Blake is eating stars
& one, very slowly,
Brightens inside my mouth

Williams: Poetry is “the news.”
Olson: “Some good news/ better get behind”