Teredos & Gribbles

TORCH SONG: SHIPWORM by Danniel Schoonebeek and Allyson Paty




Was a time what I took from you
I took into myself. My mouth
full of wood. Full of your bulk.
Now when I move, I remove you.
Nothing happens in which I don’t.




                       •



Where do I stand now the jetty
has buckled? Have heart, take after
the water. How it breaks against
itself and won’t wear out. Even this
scrap of wood—Taste. Just salt.




About the Authors

Allyson Paty was raised in New York City, where she continues to live. Her poems have appeared in Tin House and the text journal A Similar But Different Quality. She can be reached at: allyson.paty@gmail.com.

Danniel Schoonebeek will be featured as the new voice in poetry in the Fall 2010 issue of Tin House. His essays and reviews have appeared in Publisher’s Weekly, Tin House, and American Poet. He lives in Brooklyn and can be reached at danniel.schoonebeek@gmail.com.

Torch Songs is a series of diptych poems on which Allyson Paty and Danniel Schoonebeek collaborate. There are many. For more information, please contact either poet.


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Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 Allyson Paty, Danniel Schoonebeek, East River, Hudson River, Teredos & Gribbles No Comments

You Will Not Find Her at the Bottom of the River On Whose Shores Your Life Has Been Squandered, by David Hollander

Well then down you go.  Spiraling into darkness with the regulator hissing and the funk of the Hudson clinging to your suit like rime, the spotlight held at arm’s length and advancing its bad joke into a slurry of black mud and pollution, the bubbles racing from your mouth toward a theoretical surface as you penetrate deeper into that living darkness which cinctures the earth and makes a mockery of your personal ephemera, of the husband you no longer recognize, of the advanced degrees that belie your fecklessness, of the psychotropic prescriptions that mediate your pain, of her empty crib with its bone-white spindles, of the lewd smile of the young man at the dive shop, of the dappled morning sunlight outside your bedroom window and the ferocious joy it has occasionally instilled, of your fear of spiders and your fear of bridges and your fear of stained glass cathedrals—the darkness making a mockery of love.

Your heart punching at the wetsuit as you sink to the bottom of this urban river on whose shores your life has been squandered, this river which preserves that original conundrum from which the entire cosmology was birthed in an unfathomable instant of fire, pushed from some icy womb of Nothingness so as to spread out virus-like and then die its slow death.  The depth gauge glows green in the murk, fifty feet, then sixty and then yes, as promised, here is the oily bottom rising up to meet you and you lay your belly down in the earth’s black blood, indulging in the deep gulps of air you’ve been counseled against taking, your body hot and electric within the suit as if the neoprene enclosed only pulsing organs and circulatory twine.  You peer out across the riverbottom and down a corridor of visibility above which the particulate matter hovers like smoke in a housefire, then you kick hard once and glide out above the planet’s bottom where creatures deformed by metropolitan poisons live out their sorry half-witted lives.

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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 Authors, David Hollander, Freight train, Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Grand Piano, Objects, Teredos & Gribbles, The Princess Anne No Comments

Beside by Nicole Haroutunian


Beside by Nicole Haroutunian

Beside by Nicole Haroutunian

Wharf Rats & Dead Giraffe

Ice Cream Truck & Grand Piano

Shopping Cart & Formica Dinette

Toredoes & Gribbles

Artist Statement

BESIDE is an edition of 2o. The images are printed with ink on a Gocco B6 press and the text is printed in Futura with East River water on a Chandler & Price Pilot Press. The envelope is handmade and soaked in East River water. Additional text and waves drawn in blue ink were later added to the prints and can be seen here.

When I began BESIDE, I hoped to print on handmade paper created from scraps scavenged from NYC’s riverbanks. But, after a month of walking up and down the Hudson, hopping fences to get close to the East River, I only had collected a scant bagful of scraps—not nearly enough for four prints in an edition of twenty. What better reason to have to reconceive the project, though—the riverbanks just aren’t that dirty anymore. Even when I decided to print using East River water instead, I was amazed that the water I collected, dipped off a rock in Williamsburg, had no discernable smell, no weird cast or color. So, rather than obscuring my images of objects—teredoes and gribbles, shopping carts and grand pianos, ice cream trucks and Formica dinettes, wharf rats and drowned giraffes—the text emphasizes their strange side-by-side presence in the city’s underwater landscape, making their identities all the more clear.

About the Artist

Nicole Haroutunian is an editor of Underwater New York. Her bio can be found here.

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Sunday, October 4th, 2009 Artists, Body of Water, Coney Island Creek, East River, Formica dinette, Giraffe, Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Grand Piano, Nicole Haroutunian, Objects, Rockaway, Shopping cart, Teredos & Gribbles, The Narrows, Wharf rats No Comments

You Will Not Find Her at the Bottom of the River on Whose Shores Your Life Has Been Squandered by David Hollander

Well then down you go.  Spiraling into darkness with the regulator hissing and the funk of the Hudson clinging to your suit like rime, the spotlight held at arm’s length and advancing its bad joke into a slurry of black mud and pollution, the bubbles racing from your mouth toward a theoretical surface as you penetrate deeper into that living darkness which cinctures the earth and makes a mockery of your personal ephemera, of the husband you no longer recognize, of the advanced degrees that belie your fecklessness, of the psychotropic prescriptions that mediate your pain, of her empty crib with its bone-white spindles, of the lewd smile of the young man at the dive shop, of the dappled morning sunlight outside your bedroom window and the ferocious joy it has occasionally instilled, of your fear of spiders and your fear of bridges and your fear of stained glass cathedrals—the darkness making a mockery of love.

Your heart punching at the wetsuit as you sink to the bottom of this urban river on whose shores your life has been squandered, this river which preserves that original conundrum from which the entire cosmology was birthed in an unfathomable instant of fire, pushed from some icy womb of Nothingness so as to spread out virus-like and then die its slow death.  The depth gauge glows green in the murk, fifty feet, then sixty and then yes, as promised, here is the oily bottom rising up to meet you and you lay your belly down in the earth’s black blood, indulging in the deep gulps of air you’ve been counseled against taking, your body hot and electric within the suit as if the neoprene enclosed only pulsing organs and circulatory twine.  You peer out across the riverbottom and down a corridor of visibility above which the particulate matter hovers like smoke in a housefire, then you kick hard once and glide out above the planet’s bottom where creatures deformed by metropolitan poisons live out their sorry half-witted lives.

› Continue reading

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Sunday, September 27th, 2009 Authors, Body, Body of Water, David Hollander, Formica dinette, Freight train, Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Grand Piano, Hudson River, Objects, Oil, Stripped cars, Teredos & Gribbles, The Princess Anne No Comments

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