Gale Batchelder

Chalk Song Gale Batchelder

Using Werner Herzog's extraordinary documentary film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the discovery of a cave full of Paleolithic art, three poets-Gale Batchelder, Susan Berger-Jones, and Judson Evans-decided to collaborate. Together and individually, they worked over time, with comments and revisions by the others, until the poems in Chalk Song began to take shape, the inimitable weaving together of three voices guided by sonic reverberations, time travel, and Frank O'Hara's understanding of movies as that "glamorous country." This is an extraordinary book full of gorgeous music pulling you into its deep and fantastic crevices. Read Chalk Song and get lost on its many paths, where the "jars are on fire" and "you are the opposite of Orpheus." - John Yau, author of Genghis Chan on Drums




Imagine poetry as a chain of tool making, hand-to-hand, voice-to-voice. The poems in Chalk Song breach the membrane of the cave wall to trace the otherness of the human voice at the source of our linguistic imagination, from its first expression to the media of our post-modern world.