Nancy Couto

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" height=95 BGCOLOR="#CC99CC" TEXT="#080000" background="006265f1ezuady.png"> <div> <FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" ><B>FootHills 2011</B></FONT><B>  </B><B> </B><B>|   </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="FootHills 2011"><U><B>home</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="FootHills 2011"><U>FootHills 2011</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id13.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Books 2011"><U>Books 2011</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id14.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="FHP Poets Alphabetically"><U>FHP Poets Alphabetically</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id27.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Wheeler Hill 2011 Readings"><U>Wheeler Hill 2011 Readings</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id12.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Martin Burke"><U>Martin Burke</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id15.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Ann E. Michael"><U>Ann E. 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My job was to process group insurance claims, medical and life. I remember that a particular claim had me stumped for a while. A husband and wife had crashed their private plane in the mountains of northern California. Both were dead when the searchers found them, and no one could determine the order of death, or, in colder words, which spouse's contingent beneficiary was to receive all the life insurance money.  Fortunately someone dug up a little-known law under which, when a man and a woman die in a common accident, the man is presumed to survive the woman.  I don't believe this “ladies first” rule is still in effect, except possibly in Louisiana.</div> <bR> <div> Fast forward a couple of decades or so.  I was struggling with a poem called “The Common Accident,” a difficult poem for me because it dealt obliquely with my aging father's deteriorating health.  At around the same time, I was fooling around with dBase III on an old DOS computer.  I knew nothing about programming, not really, but I was working for a university press at the time, and, because I needed a database to track subsidiary rights sales, I was spending an hour or so each day working out menus and submenus to take me from the specifics of a published book to its possible other incarnations in various languages and bindings.  </div> <bR> <div> The menus and submenus were what fascinated me. I saw them as a series of roads to take or not to take, signposts suggesting real and imagined choices.  I started playing with “The Common Accident,” spinning lines off into other poems that I called “polychotomies,” going for something messier than a dichotomy, something unpredictable, sort of like life.  What I wanted was an open-ended structure that would allow me to generate poems out of details of personal or family history and to link them in unexpected sequences.  When the series threatened to sprawl out of control, I wrote “The Accidentals,” which is composed entirely of phrases from the poems that precede it, in an attempt to pull everything together, sort of unlike life.</div> <bR> <div> As for Carlisle, she just happened. She is tougher and braver than I am. But the butterfly was real.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> From the book:</div> <bR> <div> <B>THEY DOUBLE UP AROUND THE ABSENCE </B></div> <div> <B>OF CAMPFIRES</B></div> <bR> <div> and sing old songs.  They sing “Oh bury me</div> <div> not,” and where the campfire isn't</div> <div> pulls them in, as if that empty center</div> <div> were a sun and they were planets held</div> <div> in orbit by its force.  Where the campfire</div> <div> isn't is the denser for its being</div> <div> bereft of visible warmth, and they double</div> <div> up for warmth but also for distraction,</div> <div> silliness, the small jealousies surfacing,</div> <div> the women with their perms, perfumes, and clip-</div> <div> on earrings acting coy and the men</div> <div> in polo shirts and porkpie hats talking</div> <div> loud, competing fiercely for</div> <div> undivided attention.  They know</div> <bR> <div> that if they look into where the campfire</div> <div> isn't, they will see the flappers'</div> <div> cloches and silk stockings.  They will see</div> <div> running boards, Rita Hayworth, wedding rings,</div> <div> ration books, babies, bungalows,</div> <div> and lawn mowers.  Every now and then</div> <div> someone puts another log on top</div> <div> of where the campfire isn't.  They must be</div> <div> very careful not to watch too closely.</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> Nancy Vieira Couto's poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including <I>The Iowa Review,</I> <I>Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review,</I> and <I>Good Poems, American Places.  </I>Her book <I>The Face in the Water</I> won the 1989 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press.  Her other awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society, and  a Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Grant.  She was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and now lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is poetry editor of <I>Epoch.</I></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>CARLISLE & THE COMMON ACCIDENT</B></div> <div> <B> </B><FONT SIZE="4" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Garamond" >is a 36 page hand-stitched chapbook - $10.00</FONT></div> <bR> <div> TO ORDER  ON-LINE                               </div> <div>       </div> <bR> <div> From the US         <form target="paypal" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"> <input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/sc-but-01.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!"> <input type="hidden" name="add" value="1"> <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_cart"> <input type="hidden" name="business" value="fhp@foothillspublishing.com"> <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Carlisle & the Common Accident"> <input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="11-11"> <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="10.00"> <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD"> </form>  </div> <bR> <div> From Canada    <form target="paypal" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"> <input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/sc-but-01.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!"> <input type="hidden" name="add" value="1"> <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_cart"> <input type="hidden" name="business" value="fhp@foothillspublishing.com"> <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Carlisle & the Common Accident"> <input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="11-11"> <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="10.00"> <input type="hidden" name="shipping" value="2.75"> <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD"> </form>  </div> <bR> <div> From Other Countries            <form target="paypal" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post"> <input type="image" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/sc-but-01.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!"> <input type="hidden" name="add" value="1"> <input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_cart"> <input type="hidden" name="business" value="fhp@foothillspublishing.com"> <input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Carlisle & the Common Accident"> <input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="11-11"> <input type="hidden" name="amount" value="10.00"> <input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="USD"> <input type="hidden" name="shipping" value="5.00"> </form>  </div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="id11.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Ordering By Mail"><U>To order through mail click here</U></A></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>