In Kyla Houbolt’s rendering of the world, the goings-on of frogs, goats and chickens weigh just as heavily and with as much import as asking ourselves “Does a civilized nation exist?” Becoming Altar weaves themes of fire, dreams, magic, and the need for shelter in poems where there is widespread confusion, in which even the Ancients are unable to recognize and understand the bigger picture. In turns existential and surreal, Houbolt reminds us that “maps are optional […] aren’t we all lost?” while also reminding us that we are “in the direct company/of everything alive.” —David Harrison Horton, author of Model Answers and editor of Saginaw
Available from Asterism here
“All lives, all dances, and all is loud” from the Gabon Pygmy, is quoted by Jerome Rothenberg in the anthology Technicians of the Sacred. I was pulled to poetry because I wanted to participate in that, in the ways humans create. I grew up with poetry in the household, read aloud, on bookshelves, and immersed myself in it seriously at times, though I never sought a career. That kind of immersion into creation is also why I began gardening. I wanted to participate in the way the earth makes beauty. In this way for me poetry and gardening have shared roots. It has to do with life force and how it manifests all things. My five (so far) chapbooks are children of the internet, when it became relatively easy to find venues and connect with other poets and with publishers of poetry. But my very first published poem appeared in a little newsprint quarterly called Cedar Rock, out of West Texas, sometime in the early 1970s. (Neither it nor its editor is with us anymore.) —Kyla Houbolt
Appropriate Drowning Outfit
I’m not sure how to turn this life into a resume.
I don’t write that kind of poetry.
I do notice that the cloud
has a bone missing and
I can relate to that. I’ll be honest
and say I have learned only one word
of heron language and it may be
that I made it up. It’s easy for me to do that
and I hear people lie a lot in resumes
but I can’t, not without vomiting the truth
later on. Which defeats the whole purpose.
Meanwhile is a word I use too often.
It’s because so much else is also happening
all the time, and I keep noticing it.
For example, the way I continue to, impossibly,
live. Paying close attention
to the wrong things. The boneless cloud.
The inscrutable heron. The abuse of sound.
The first full collection by a poet who in the words of poet and critic Susan M. Schultz, “asks how anyone can be a poet, then answers with another question: ‘How can we not?’”
Kyla Houbolt’s poems are just so fresh and generous it’s delightful. They want to give the reader real things, but not as a burden… something to look at on the window sill that gets the sun. They go around ‘putting a knot in the universe’ with their quick images, alive to the ‘glancing unfelt / blow’ of line breaks, the wise surprise of scattered rhyme. Go on, try one. Take a few if you like. —Jeremy Noel-Tod, editor of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry
Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener living in North Carolina.
Learn more about Kyla Houbolt at her webpage here
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