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Nothing in my childhood warned me that I might later become interested in poetry. Born in Spittal-an-der-Drau, Austria, in 1948, I spent only weeks in that country before the Anglo/Austrian family moved back to my father's home in Manchester. The occasional summer trips to visit relatives in Vienna were adventures which left me with a lasting affection for foreign places and train rides. After leaving school and spending two years in an insurance office I moved on to study and practice graphic design until 1971, the year I moved to Vienna.
During the seven years in which I lived in Austria I traveled widely, usually with paper and watercolour paints, enjoyed museums and cultural atmosphere, and made my first attempts at writing poetry at the time I met a group of English-speaking writers in Vienna. My first readings were for the mostly expatriate audience in Vienna with other members of this group.
Having met and married Roberta, a musician from Arizona who was studying and playing in Vienna, I faced the choice of staying where we were or moving to the USA. We chose to move. In Phoenix, I once organized several readings and series, co-edited a magazine (The Signal) with Joan Silva, friend from that Vienna group who had moved to Idaho, and began taking poetry more seriously. I started to submit work to magazines and today I appreciate the efforts made by small press publishers as much as ever.
Together, we have come to find increasing enjoyment in the Southwest landscape and wildlife. These themes have made their way into much of my writing after I overcame what I now recognise as an early bias against "nature poetry," no doubt the residue of misunderstanding school studies of Wordsworth and John Clare. As I gained more experience of our desert and climate, I found the tension that I had formerly missed in writing about land and the non-human world.
My education in poetry, such as it is, came about from reading. Eastern Europeans have been especially interesting to me, working at a meeting of sophisticated cultures with crude politics before 1989. I often find that we have more in common with them than we'd ever deduce from watching the evening news. Each individual has his/her own approach and style and reason for writing in a particular way. I find poetry useful in granting an aesthetic in reacting to political events and the sterility encroaching on life in a corporate uniform.
David Chorlton's poems have appeared in more than 250 literary magazines in print, including: Abraxas, The Bitter Oleander, Bloomsbury Review, Blue Unicorn, Buckle &, Chiron Review, Contact II, Cumberland Poetry Review, The Devil's Millhopper, Heaven Bone, Hawaii Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, The MacGuffin, Main Street Rag, Mississippi Mud, New Mexico Humanities Review, The Other Side, Pembroke Magazine, Poet Lore, Slipstream,and the Webster Review.
As well as in the online magazines: The Adirondack Review, Acsent, Poems Niederngasse, 3rd Muse, Three Candles, Thunder Sandwich and Softblow.
The River from Waiting for the Quetzal, March Street Press, 2006 How to phrase the argument when writing to a senator on behalf of a river is the question. The one I have in mind flows north from Mexico, so I could speak for it as an immigrant unable to turn back and face its source but think better of the impulse and consider referring to the benefits it carries for the songbirds so alive among the cottonwoods. Think of life, I begin, without them. They cannot speak to authority, just as I cannot sing as they do. And I put myself in the senator's place, sit down at his desk and open his mail. Such a bleak landscape, littered with statistics and complaints, so I begin over with Imagine this is all you were elected to protect; imagine our lands drying up for want of a letter written in the language of a bird whose reflection in the water grows pale like invisible ink. Predictions There will be ice on the moonlight in the country of wolves when they rush from the cover of the trees. There will be dust on the riverbed at summer's end, just before the swallows disappear. There will be schedules left at bus stops and old shoes in the road. There will be blind men asking directions and brides dressed in white selling confessions. There will be a time of plenty and another of even more. There will be a time of need and nobody will know the difference. There will be deserts so beautiful on the night the cereus bloom even the lost traveler will lie down among the thorns glad to be alive. Valley of the Jaguar A few rags of cloud hang over the valley remembered for the jaguar who looked around and was suddenly gone. The path leads down through diminishing light where gentle sounds smooth the way even as your foothold becomes so tenuous you despair of ever climbing back. But mystery draws you in, replaces your clothes with a pelt, oils your limbs which have stiffened from much walking, and sharpened your senses to a feline point. Nothing, from the sheen on the back of the mantis to the blue on the Morpho's wing, escapes your attention now you are the last of your kind in this place. Prayer Flags from Places You Can't Reach, Pudding House Publications, 2006 A string of five colours on the front porch declare a fragile peace in an election year. They talk brightly; green for the forest, yellow for the desert, blue for the sky, red for the sun and white for silent introspection. I'm not a Buddhist, but I listen to the wind. I don't meditate, but stare out of the window to give my nerves a rest from the interminable campaign. The flags are a Himalayan breath of snow and occupation in a city in the desert. They have no ambition; they don't argue; they have nothing to invest in the market. They are the last resort of a stranger tired of hostility, five broken syllables stolen from somebody else's language to say what can't be said in English, that power is wanting nothing that takes another's life.