C. S. Giscombe – författare

A cross-genre poetry collection that troubles the idea of poetic voice while considering history, biology, the shamanistic, and the shapes of racial memory.  In the final section of Negro Mountain, C. S. Giscombe writes, “Negro Mountain—the summit of which is the highest point in Pennsylvania—is a default, a way among others to think about the Commonwealth.” Named for an “incident” in which a Black man was killed while fighting on the side of white enslavers against Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century, this mountain has a shadow presence throughout this collection; it appears, often indirectly, in accounts of visions, reimaginings of geography, testimonies about the “natural” world, and speculations and observations about race, sexuality, and monstrosity. These poems address location, but Giscombe—who worked for ten years in central Pennsylvania—understands location to be a practice, the continual “action of situating.”  The book weaves through the ranges of thinking that poetic voice itself might trouble. Addressing a gallery of figures, Giscombe probes their impurities and ambivalences as a way of examining what languages “count” or “don’t count” as poetry. Here, he finds that the idea of poetry is visionary, but also investigatory and exploratory.

C. S. Giscombe's "Here" is a long, single poem that takes place in a progression of three settings, three unlikely locations: the edges of the urban south, the edges--just beyond and just within the city--of rural Ohio, and the places where upstate New York forms the border with Canada, "the next country." "Here" is racial in its knowledge and acknowledgment of the great geographic archetype, the journey north; yet the work's nature denies the closure of destination. The poem's interest instead is in statement(s) of situation, in "the path traced by a moving point." First published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1994, now available again.

A poet and a book artist take a train across the United States, creating and conversing along the way. Late in the fall of 2017, poet C. S. Giscombe and book artist Judith Margolis boarded an Amtrak train in New York City and, four days later, stepped off another train at the edge of San Francisco Bay. Giscombe was returning home to California to address an all-white audience on the problem of white supremacy, and expatriate Margolis, accustomed to a somewhat solitary existence, was visiting the United States and making collages. Traveling together, they each turned their train quarters into writing and drawing “studios” where they engaged in conversations and arguments and shared experiences of the discomforts and failures of recent times.  Their original intention had been to travel west and document, in journals and sketchpads, the complex, charged American landscape, but as the trip progressed—and in the months afterwards—the project took on a new shape. Train Music, the book that resulted, recollects and explores the century’s racial and gendered conflicts—sometimes sensually, sometimes in stark images, sometimes in a “mixed economy” of poetry and prose.

Ohio Railroads is a long poem—in essay form—with origins in the author's memory of a dream in which one of his parents died and the other, in response, sent forward a warning in what may have been the persona of the departed one. Ohio Railroads explores the peculiar weight of the dream and accounts for some of the measurement of the accessible world. The place of exploration is the several neighborhoods that comprise black Dayton (neighborhoods cut into big triangles by the train lines) and also "big Ohio" itself (with its mythologies of settlement and retreat and migration, its heroes, and its weather systems).

Concerned with specific locales in northern Canada named for the 19th-century Jamaican miner and explorer John Robert Giscome, the volume incorporates a variety of historical documents, maps, and dreams, to go "in & further in, " discovering and documenting music, racial dichotomies, sexuality, and the ways in which landscape itself is described.

"[A] major figure in contemporary African American letters." Henry Louis Gates