nude
by Tereza Joy Kramer
a creek’s broken ice reflects
the chipped whiteness
a lone sycamore trunk
utterly unself-conscious
reaching up
holding on inside
Tereza Joy Kramer was a news reporter in Mexico and the U.S. before turning to poetry and an MFA at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Cicada, The Iguana Review, 103: The Image Warehouse, Re)verb, Little Pear Press’ Regrets Only: Contemporary Poets on the Theme of Regret, Haven Books’ Not a Muse: the inner lives of women, Women Made Gallery’s Her Mark 2004, and Gival Press’ Poetic Voices Without Borders.
This poem led me to think of that idea of the objective correlative, that object that gives access to some deep other thing. How, if at all, is that idea at work here and how does this idea of the objective correlative work with compressed poetry? This question cannot really be answered, or perhaps the question itself is the answer. Compressed poetry is objective correlative—it is turning the 21 characters of our alphabet into access points to something indefinable, into little stick-figure frames for immeasurably expanding windows.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
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