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Eugenia Leigh

Eugenia Leigh

Eugenia Leigh is the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Her writing has appeared in several publications including The Collagist, Indiana Review, and the Best New Poets 2010 anthology. The recipient of fellowships and awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman, Rattle and the Asian American Literary Review, Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and serves as the Poetry Editor of Kartika Review.
Kurt Brown was a mapmaker—a poet who could lay out the landscape of poetry with its "gigantic rivers, / oceanic lakes, precipitous headlands / that loom out," and urge us to go where the maps guide us. I was a graduate student—green, mostly lost, and in need of such maps—when I met Kurt. He taught my first craft class and offered stacks of free literary journals at the start of each session.

My spirit reverts to the openness of that student self as I sit with Kurt's anthology and absorb its first poem, "Cartology." The poem resurrects in me that hungry fervor of the fledgling poet who hoards free journals and, like the speaker in this poem, runs her "fingers over blank provinces, / those white quadrants the mind cannot / enter, waiting for the birth of the first / animal."

And now, I am struck with the understanding that in this particular reading on this particular evening, Kurt is not only the cartographer, but also the traveler. The poem tells us that "the world was measured by experience / and broken bones." That when travelers "entered" these mysterious, unexplored expanses, "the men changed / as the world changed, admitting / a new order of things." It is difficult to read this poem without wondering: couldn't this be what Kurt is doing now? Taking new shape as he, before us, ventures into that "far edge / of a page—Terra Incognita—the unknown"?


Cartography

I love those maps, the old ones
bulging with distortion—gigantic rivers,
oceanic lakes, precipitous headlands
that loom out, hundreds of miles
into the sea. I love the way they go blank
and featureless on the far edge
of a page—Terra Incognita—the unknown
made palpable but lacking details.
Monsters lurk there, chimeras
wound around themselves,
breathing fire. Always, in a distant
latitude, the furious face of the wind—
lips pursed, cheeks bulging—
spews out its breath in powerful scrolls,
blows a ship onward into
vast grids of Ocean. I love the round maps
that show continents almost touching,
long before they drifted apart.
For me, the maps are real,
actual pictures of the brain, the heart's geography
laid out by living hands—
a river the size of a river in memory
that raged one spring, wrecked boats
and took a week to cross—
a lake the size of boredom that stood
between the wilderness and home.
A range of mountains, walled up
and snarled with clouds, were mountains
of imagination, though men
had seen them, climbed breathlessly
among their peaks and chasms
then returned to Paris, London or Spain
to scrawl their memories
on parchment for a credible king.
The world was measured by experience
and broken bones, and if the trees
stood taller than trees could stand
that was, after all, the forest
they had entered, seen through the eyes
of avarice and fear. I love to run
my fingers over blank provinces,
those white quadrants the mind cannot
enter, waiting for the birth of the first
animal and the new flowers,
shimmering without names.
When they entered them, the men changed
as the world changed, admitting
a new order of things—a bird so blue
it stood out darkly against the sky,
a big-toothed rat that could breathe underwater
and harvest trees. When they entered them
the earth grew vaster
and the future created itself out of the clean
sweep of oblivion. Nothing
has ever been the same again.

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