The Poetry Experiment

2011-12-11T09:25:00.001-08:00

Amy King writes: A review once described my work as “moving between the registers of the fabulous and the mundane;” as I write, however, I don’t purposely aim to interlace tonalities – I amass, pile, and occasionally flatten as I beat my matter into text.

Poetry needs no one new party to lead it into the fraying future; if we’re to save the world, let’s raise a revolution as shapeshifters. In other words, this book is about metamorphosis through a radical cherishing. I am ravished by the world, aren’t you?

Please support Small Press Distribution - here.

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"Rarely have the nude and the cooked been so neatly joined” as in Amy King’s I Want to Make You Safe. If “us,” “herons,” and “dust” rhyme, then these poems rhyme. If that makes you feel safe, it shouldn’t. Amy King’s poems are exuberant, strange, and a bit grotesque. They’re spring-loaded and ready for trouble. Categories collapse. These are the new “thunderstorms with Barbie roots."
                                                                                               — Rae Armantrout

Vulnerability, fragility, and anxiety are all flushed out into the open here and addressed with such strong sound and rhythm that we recognize a resilient, defiant strength within them. King puts relentless pressure on forces seemingly beyond our reach and, in bringing them closer, exposes their own vulnerable centers. This is a poetry equally committed to language as a tool with social obligations and language as an art material obligated to reveal its own beauty. King’s language does both magnificently.
                                                                                                    — Cole Swensen

Amy King’s poems seem to encompass all that we think of as the “natural” world, i.e. sex, sun, love, rotting, hatching, dreaming, especially in the wonderful long poem “This Opera of Peace.” She brings these abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living: “Let the walls bear up the angle of the floor,/Let the mice be tragic for all that is caged,/Let time’s contagion mar us/until spoken people lie as particles of wind.
                                                                                                    — John Ashbery

I love Amy King's smile in photos of Amy King, Amy King's exuberance and looping, bashing panache (flamboyant manner, reckless courage) in the poems of Amy King, I'm going to say Amy King every chance I get in this blurb to make you think "I gotta read me some Amy King," especially if you're "looking for anything/that will pull the cork, boil the blood/of displeasure," as only the poems of Amy King can in the world in which Amy King is King (and Queen).
                                                                                                     — Bob Hicok

The first poem I read by Amy King was "MEN BY THE LIPS OF WOMEN" and it struck me with a force I had previously felt on encountering masterworks by Lorca and Dylan Thomas. I won't live long enough to see if her poetry will continue to equal the magnificence of theirs, but the fact that she achieved it once (at least) proves to me it could.
                                                                                                      — Bill Knott

~~~~

VAGUE POEM

2008-04-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

Vague Poem

The trip west.
—I think I dreamed that trip.
They talked a lot of “rose rocks”
or maybe “rock roses”
—I’m not sure now, but someone tried to get me some.
(And two or three students had.)

She said she had some at her house.
They were by the back door, she said.
—A ramshackle house.
An Army house? No, “a Navy house.” Yes,
that far inland.
There was nothing by the back door but dirt
or that same dry, monochrome, sepia straw I’d seen everywhere.
Oh, she said, the dog has carried them off.
(A big black dog, female, was dancing around us.)

Later, as we drank tea from mugs, she found one
“a sort of one.” “This one is just beginning. See—
you can see here, it’s beginning to look like a rose.
It’s—well, a crystal, crystals form—
I don’t know any geology myself …”
(Neither did I.)
Faintly, I could make out—perhaps—in the dull,
rose-red lump of (apparently) soil
a rose-like shape; faint glitters … Yes, perhaps
there was a secret, powerful crystal at work inside.

I almost saw it: turning into a rose
without any of the intervening
roots, stem, buds, and so on; just
earth to rose and back again.
Crystallography and its laws:
something I once wanted badly to study,
until I learned that it would involve a lot of arithmetic,
that is, mathematics.

Just now, when I saw you naked again,
I thought the same words: rose-rock, rock-rose …
Rose, trying, working, to show itself,
forming, folding over,
unimaginable connections, unseen, shining edges.
Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal,
clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline nipples,
rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,
exacting roses from the body,
and the even darker, accurate, rose of sex—

Elizabeth Bishop, from The New Yorker

THE BIGHT

2008-04-11T16:45:00.000-07:00

The Bight
by Elizabeth Bishop

[On my birthday]

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

--Elizabeth Bishop

DAILY PARDONS

2008-04-11T12:01:00.000-07:00

Daily Pardons

I wrangle for this bit
daily. The unfooled
bread of the body
yields to a regimented nap,
a bribe in a cup of drink.
It folds its offended petals.
Digits calm.
Then the long phrase of me
is spoken. Silence drools
over it, a lusty
and unmanaged child,
between two loaves rising,
dividing without end,
without a true middle:
what should have been done,
that which won't be. A Lord
presides over them, needing no sleep.
He worries about my anger
for the man hovering over
my seat on the train,
the implacable blade of being
unhappy in the present,
a blade as thin as the present's
sheath�

I speak to the Lord of things.
I ask him to pull in
his wake a night,
its incorrigible
repetitions
and make out of it a rule
to follow in the dawn
alongside birds that open and close�

--Ana Božičević, THE CORTLAND REVIEW

Like a Photograph

2008-03-30T15:42:00.000-07:00

Like a Photograph

You might like to live in one of these smallish
houses that start to climb a hill, then fumble
back to the beginning as though nothing had happened.

You might enjoy a dinner of sandwiches
with the neighbor who makes concessions.
It will be all over in a minute, you said. We both
believed that, and the clock’s ticking: flame on, flame on.

John Ashbery

[from NO: A Journal of the Arts]

SPOIL SONG

2008-03-30T15:36:00.000-07:00

SPOIL SONG

The man poses in the trees as a lion with a crooked tail. He looks
on the two girls with animal regret, if only he could play, if they
might want him. The upturned willow was commissioned
by the river. All afternoon he watches. The girls leap from
the willow. They hang their suits in the branches. Girls, girls
the world tells him. Girls should not sleep in the woods.
Their dinner, their fire, he watches. Pretend bear. Pretend
gun. In the air, a coal perfume. They wake twice, in the trash,
raccoons. Inside the tent they might want him. Not the raccoons,
not the bear. Girls should not sleep. Never animals
that bother you. One girl tears out the other's hair
to wake her. Again, the raccoons. A deer then. The lake. No.
What teaches them not to sleep. The man crouched over them.
Without light what teaches them. Soured air. Car keys. He mentions
the gun, crouched over them. Bear sighting, there is a bear.
They might want him with no light. Black bears don’t bother you.
What teaches one to play along. Over there. Stand guard. Thank god
you’ll help us. A little actress in a fake play. What teaches her
what to say. What teaches her to quiet the other. To unlock
the car. Thank him. To drive away.

Sara Michas-Martin

[from DIAGRAM]

NEW STREET

2008-03-30T15:30:00.000-07:00

NEW STREET

The final light is the last fur and no animals left.
Listen to me as if you’ll be on earth forever.
Some lamps of the rehabilitated enriched neighborhood
Like six approaching mocking bodies in space
Are ochre, white, sorrel, sulphur blue-white,
Imitation suns of the sun letting go of us
In late winter under a big blue steel bridge
Where the warehouses and their repulsive sidewalks
Have been washed and dried as if they fit in a dishwasher.
Would you listen as if I were gone,
A time from now, but gone,
A time from now, but gone,
And you were around, not to pass on my impression
Of the lamps gathering in a darkening space
Like a round-up of suns in a solar-system prairie
Between the bridge and our building,
Not to pass on my impression
As an immortal impression (pitiful desire),
But I think it would not be too like hell
For you to travel alone by foot through the rare light
Under the obnoxious domineering bridge
Between the phonied buildings where the jobs will never come back.
Listen, I don’t know if everything’s an accident,
A continuing explosion in which the myths of eating and love are beside the point.

–Arthur Vogelsang

ADVICE FOR EXCELLENT ACHIEVEMENT AND EXEMPLARY BEHAVIOR

2008-03-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

ADVICE FOR EXCELLENT ACHIEVEMENT AND EXEMPLARY BEHAVIOR

The Newscaster entered the history of her people,
the children study her for a grade, and they know her
from the advertising billboards in all the suburbs.
Who knows if she’s going to have her photo taken for “Playboy?”
Mommy, why does this lady have such a big ass?
So that the daily “Nova Makedonija” will not perish or else your father
will hang us. And why did you get an F in history?
The teacher asked who wrote our anthem,
and I said Ataturk, because I had melted into the palms
that the Turkish girl sitting next to me on the school bench
was warming between my legs, and drawing
bridal veils in my notebooks.
Shame on you son.
Is that why I sit at home, patching dead languages,
starching sonnets, is that why my back’s killing me
from washing Byzantine hymnographers’ manuscripts,
Havel’s letters and all sorts of other cult mystifications?
And every night my cheeks defecate,
and I have to tell you, not even Cleopatra went through
so much toilet paper. It is for nothing that
I press Delete, nothing can erase them,
and even less stop them from ejecting
feces–worms in a game of mirrors.
Oh son, son, it’s not the wind beating against the shutters that wakes you at night,
it’s the pores of my outer skin flushing themselves with water from the toilet,
and whoever arrives first in the dream
on the other side of the cable TV goes to pee. Look at her,
she’s all dressed up as if she was talking about Osiris,
not about the rice that caught diarrhea at dawn,
and do not ask shy she has such red eyes,
or why her nails are all gnarled, and her cheeks transparent.
Study son, repeat, not battles and peace summits,
but: why doesn’t a dead person’s hairdo stay in place
for more than ten minutes, why didn’t Isis
catch it from Osiris,
(and your father once told your uncle:
the more I beat her, the more she loves me),
because you have to know everything so as not to know anything
and be photocopied on freshly painted walls,
white walls for all those wonderful people.
Study son. Study will not harm the head underwritten
by the Lethe Insurance Company.

–Lidija Dimkovska, DO NOT AWAKEN THEM WITH HAMMERS

HYMN

2008-03-27T14:45:00.000-07:00

HYMN

As complicated as a nightingale,
as tinny as,
kind-hearted as,
as crease-proof, as traditional,
as green grave sour, as streaky,
as symmetrical,
as hairy,
as near the water, true to the wind,
as fireproof, frequently turned over,
as childishly easy, well-thumbed as,
as new and creaking, expensive as,
as deeply cellared, domestic as,
as easily lost, shiny with use,
as thinly blown, as snow-chilled as,
as independent, as mature,
as heartless as,
as mortal as,
as simple as my soul.

–Günter Grass, from IN THE EGG AND OTHER POEMS

My More Merely

2008-03-27T14:31:00.000-07:00

My More Merely

by Morgan Lucas Schuldt

In this surround, above the downs,
are my kind of live.

An mmhmm her
fever-few-&-far-between.

Cherry get, if gotten you be.
Otherhow unhindered by the things

of me. Things like: junk-hold lungs,
bouts with be, the umm-hush & long static of kinda can.

Are twenty-six flavors of -elicious
& what-if’s head-fuck nagging blood-back for more

cream & rush, heave & shush––
dirt-back glares having some pull over the percentages.

No tut-tut strut, no lapse in gush. Just holier than wow –
an old-fashioned dumb-lovely ahh yes! suitable for basking.

Sheer towardness, raredear, I’d sky-write
a surrender for.

Little red likelihooded
I lust so much.

[From THIS RECORDING]

ROUGH GUIDE by Mark Haddon

2008-03-26T08:16:00.001-07:00

ROUGH GUIDE

Be polite at the reception desk.
Not all the knives are in the museum.
The waitresses know that a nice boy
is formed in the same way as a deckchair.
Pay for the beer and send flowers.
Introduce yourself as Richard.
Do not refer to what somebody did
at a particular time in the past.
Remember, every Friday we used to go
for a walk. I walked. You walked.
Everything in the past is irregular.
This steak is very good. Sit down.
There is no wine, but there is ice cream.
Eat slowly. I have many matches.

–Mark Haddon, THE TALKING HORSE AND THE SAD GIRL AND THE VILLIAGE UNDER THE SEA

Lauren Bender - [of course I can look like a young boy]

2005-12-31T19:44:00.000-08:00

of course I can look like a young boy
dear political poem,
I never really got into history

Mine eyes watching a man blow himself up
as you say,
a field full of shoes between us
a revolving bookcase between us
his flesh slides down the front of the TV, obscuring Janet Jackson’s sunbursting forth
in some less civilized countries the dead are dismembered by their family
left vulgar to vultures or was it all a mirage?

I would make a good soldier
please find enclosed my scores from Minesweeper,
which would be higher if I didn’t have to
cover my windows all day long
and then go to the factory
Dear ARMY, please send 8 x 10 to my 5-year old
her first sexual fantasy involved neon TRON and empathy between men

let’s just make light of it
he’ll just have to start spinning a little earlier tomorrow
let’s just gesture it down under the motion sensor
photons between us
inappropriate gnashing of teeth between us

[from Rock Heals]

Brian Howe - That Man Is Not Your Ladder

2005-11-18T07:15:00.000-08:00

Is he after your money?
Have the man violently bounce
Your choice of 2 heights
Use the top three feet or so of your ladder
Safety shoes on hard surfaces/or have a man foot the
Climbing angle to say, only 45° instead of 75.5°
This homework still may not guarantee your ladder can pass

Do not climb onto the ladder from the side
Don’t compromise your balance by extending
your reach beyond
My heart goes out to the unfortunate man in
The places where trails do not exist are not well marked
Make sure your shoes aren't slippery
Heal the man on the floor and

With plenty of room for you and your youngster, you
May be more than happy to have a stay-at-home man
This man was not speaking for me
He does not know ME, my ... a lot of validity to it
As much as women do not want to
You gotta push 'em off your leg all the time

Criticism: I have lots of male friends who would never
Answer: Your friend doesn't find you attractive, or he's
Do not climb onto the ladder from the side
Don’t compromise your balance by extending
your reach beyond
My heart goes out to the unfortunate man in
The world beneath your tread?
Note: Your health and life are at stake when you use any ladder

[from Octopus Magazine]

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal - Shine

2005-09-19T15:22:00.000-07:00

I shine on
the voices
that speak from
my TV.

I shine on
their fat lies
and lower
the volume.

I shine on
and tune out
the evil
of two lessers.

[from Shampoo Poetry]

Gina Franco - The Box

2005-09-03T10:47:00.000-07:00

What did you learn from the dead?

To turn cold in stages to stage

bleed an invisible instant goddamn

bleeding to heart to get off your

chest to neck and stomach

blow it right out of the hole hard to piss off how does it go

how does it go goes stone stone deaf to so cold so

so we heard them last night shriek at each other the bejeezus though nobody hours heard the shots, you?

Past tense of shoot also called scattergun also a shot of clear liquid

an injection to interject. You?

Oh I gave it a shot resolved my greatest desire

is mean means to go

home a marked entry an engraved—no cloned—entry to how do

you sleep how do you recognize me now I'll

do to you do to you shotgun I mean hotshot I will I'll do it I'm sick

of you yeah yeah then go 'head I'm serious asshole like you

care to miscalculate the command of the exit wound to miss

fire also revolve, er, volver, also

called ghost word yeah gimme you faker you way to take

off—shit (past tense of shoot)—

go now I'm in sight.

[from Fence]

Cynthia Sailers - Teaching Laura Mulvey

2005-08-24T06:29:00.000-07:00

in contact with the proper ladies
to seduce them with our thoughts
so that they may waver in their
underlying narrative-----their condition
to perform with reality
to believe in science: the innocence of design
running between the picture and the calmy sleep
pretending to be older than oppression
if the self is before our very eyes
an authenticity where else multiplied,
where else swimming to be plural
whether or not we find comfort in models
wanting to eat, not eating, then eating a lot
or find the false accusation of race
or absence of race
so that you may “call me a buttress of reason,”
a subject reading then pulling back
to wards the want of my own 19th c hysteria
call me a cynic, but something is there
in the yellow wallpaper and she would want
to write a narrative to say
her dystopia was fixed, gripping the wind,
the small towns torn out of books
or an accidental hideout away from view
to find the others so same and different
but not to modernize the other-----sky

something a constructivist can’t spoil
something empowered by the exercise
of Emily Dickinson
something none of us could bother
to implement a fascism a revolution
an official prize claim
to be an indigenous woman
to be identical to the others
to have all your bees in your bonnet
also called phantasma
or the better half
we were not yet formed, we were an
awful eyesore in some abstract place
& “we continue to make things worse”

with pulpy novels of lesbians
trying to get at material we can’t live
without--------------------visual images
of savoir faire fall back
into the pristine, back to readme
borne collateral for Hollywood cinema
like being deified like being incredibly gorgeous
so that he is currently stupefied
so that he is psychologically romanced
so that you have to define desire as a pronouncement
like virgin mule hair
to give my dignity some space to wander
the hallways, value the faculty that encompass us
up into an obsolete

[from Shampoo Poetry]

Chet Wiener - A Brand New Dance

2005-08-18T16:27:00.000-07:00

Carrying a table for your
Later again you can’t tell
Everything develops who’ll try
Harder it was a whisk
A culvert a camel in the mirror

With a ring marked to mumble
The friction discover in dollars
Colors raspberry reaction trilling
By the doll off or over
Passes as the pressure

The waive of its dibs
Felt my knee question blade
To glide past the rock choosing
Ripple over rip or rift together
On the air and free

[from The Brooklyn Rail]

Mairead Byrne - Downtown Crossing

2005-08-13T13:55:00.000-07:00

A cup of coffee can be a mother.
A cigarette can be a mother.
A blanket can be a mother.
A wool cap can be a mother.
A coat can be a mother.
A booth can be a mother.
A warm grating can be a mother.
You can be your own mother.

[from Fieralingue]

Matt Henriksen - When Lights Go Out at the Wooden Nipple

2005-08-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

The woman asks “Are there any virtuous sailors in the room tonight?”
A man with a neon halo says no, smashes the halo on his scalp
With his cap.
“Off to sea wit ye, den. Ar, ar,” she says.
He is gone. The room, still as a cigar
That’s been out for hours. Smells of dog.
The woman’s leg is broken: glass on stage,
Shattered in the shape of a necklace.
Lays her throat
On the beer-dew crystal rainbow, sings herself
To sleep, becoming red river.
A piano,
With nobody in it, plays. A one-eared dog
Comes through the curtains, licks the woman’s thigh.
The dog smells like saltwater, speaks: Thus
Has spoken. The woman would get up,
Make herself a drink, but she’s forgotten
Who she was: That’s the nature and the nonsense
Of being blood. She hopes the dog didn’t
Say that. But she’s riding the tide. She’s in it
For the dough: the bread of her body whitening.
The dog is just another way of saying
“I’m sorry,
Didn’t know who he was speaking to,” or “God
Help us if we remember this when we’re dead.”

[from Shampoo Poetry]

Cole Swensen - Two Poems

2005-08-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

The Hand Etched in Glass

We knew this was coming. We always thought they were flying. But, no, it's light alone. It's morning and the light is streaming in. Blinding, you think, and put your hand up to your eyes. And stayed. We're all part window. There's someone coming in through the french window, but you don't notice him; you notice the window.

The Hand Photographed

Here we tend toward particulars, though they remain black & white and/or the black before the door, the white, slipping out. They're more angular than their portraits would have led you to believe you could live here too - we're not as poor as we look. Photographs have a way of implying that it was a little cold that day, or that we live like pets in the laps of everyone who wanted something else.

[from Double Room]

Amy King - I'm the Man Who Loves You

2005-08-03T07:23:00.000-07:00

The beer has warmed to us.
Like a bear grovels for leftovers,
we are used to blood
in our veins, and other amenities.

Why does every sentence
between us
condemn loneliness?

Even in the womb,
we take note of beings
ushered past.

Love has always been
the woman in the lake.
She is her own sister,
the buoyancy of heartbreak.

Lately, I have had to trick
myself to read
with the promise of a book.

But mostly, I am taken
by the sense
of a blue suede dress
that shrinks to fit you.

[from Coconut]

Laurel Snyder - Paper Dolls

2005-07-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

This is the shape of some words,
but not just.

This resembles the story
of a girl, but not just.

This is called
making it daily.

Go ahead. Take scissors,
and with a snip, make a girl.

Might as well make many.
They'll all look alike,

but some will hold fewer hands
than others.

You'll see what I mean,
but not just.

Make a flurry
of paper bits that won't

seem to end, and what else
might you have made?

[from Drunken Boat]

Fanny Howe - Banking

2005-07-20T08:14:00.000-07:00

He was a cold-hearted Saxon
whose sex was as busy as a farm
and left the room warm
with the scent of hounds

Believe me, he could have had it with anyone—
man or woman—but he wanted to be good

These are the dangerous ones

[from AGNI 33 & 56]

Joyelle McSweeney - The Cock and Kettle

2005-07-19T04:15:00.000-07:00

The ceiling sags,
water in a sock.
Lift it over the levee and into the next duchy.

Outside the lunchspot, the rooster swings
with brackets to its comb and tail.
It creaks and crows.
The trees go one way, the car another.

Minnowing around, meowing,
carombing in the bathtub down
into the next apartment.

On the mattress, the man swims
printed with ferns.

[from The Konundrum Engine Literary Review]

Lisa Cooper - Dose

2005-07-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

Einstein, after Edison, pulled
the 20th century through its sleeve
& out into a new range of motion.
hello. long nights under
an incandescent bulb
while the message center &
humidifier draw enough juice
to light a small 19th century
village. on this station,
the up & up, we are clear
about the desire to kiss with no
superstitious icons of the saints
turned upside or right side
in any way to confuse
a general audience. hello.
would you like to see
what’s behind door #1.
every minute marks the turn
of scores of centuries. we got
the pope. we got the pope in jubilee
marking an atonement
for wrong beliefs & harmful
actions. the church vindicated
Galileo. a minor invention
every week or so. hello. we got
the pope. we got children
straining at the edge of quiet.
we got to check in daily.
after the 90s
what do you call it.

[from Spork Magazine]

Robert Gibbons - Ode to New York City [excerpt]

2005-07-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

The Sky Transformed

Need for gaiety when the first day of the weekend is spent,
unexpectedly, in a kind of silent
mourning at Ground Zero,
& the meager language
we muster remains
mostly internal,
visceral.
So the next day get up early to take the Staten Island Ferry,
not to get anywhere, because it's free,
& Baudelaire praised contemplation
of a ship, especially one in motion,
as mysterious & infinite.
With Ellis Island in the near distance, where my father said they changed
our name from Fitzgibbons,
we are poor immigrants among all the passengers,
looking over our shoulders reminding us again
of the disaster down there,
where the Towers were,
as much from the hole in the sky
as the one in the ground.
It's difficult to pull oneself up out of mourning into gaiety in one fell swoop.
I could have used the dream where my Soul became visible
to my daughter only
so that I had to look through her eyes
on the bus where my Soul was a rectangular piece of glass
hovering in the air
in the aisle
& pressed within it was a rose, Eros.
So, of course, we head to Gotham Book Mart on 47^th St.
where we know we'll find gems
like a cheap copy of Apollinaire's erotic writings,
& Baudelaire's Intimate Journals.
There's nothing like French wit to help bring one up: "She was as red as a beet,
her bosom was shaking, but she was at a loss for words."
"I am sick of France; chiefly because everyone is like Voltaire."
Frank O'Hara joins us, too,
when his Selected Poems opens all by itself
to "Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's," when we're already on our way
to 83^rd Street to meet Barney Rosset,
the legend, who published Lawrence & Miller & Olson.
But not before tramping through the desert of wealth in the Upper Sixties & Seventies making me thirsty, making me wish out loud for a Champagne bar
like the one that rescued me
from my hangover after the Rauschenberg show at the Whitney,
when all of a sudden this little gelatto place on 73^rd & Madison turns
into none other, (words in fine print,)
than a Champagne bar. Ah! Via Quadronno!
We share a glass of Gavi de Gavi for $13.50, which does the trick, getting us out of the residential desert
into the art world between 83^rd & 84^th where Janos Gat greets us at his gallery
with a glass of red wine telling us Barney & Astrid
are in the other room ready to greet us with smiles & handshakes & photographs from the war in the 40's & a story
about Joan Mitchell when Barney lived with her
in the south of France & recognized it was time,
that her work had gotten to a point
where they could go home to New York
with Pollock & de Kooning, Motherwell & Kline,
but responded she couldn't, her oeuvre too large & vast to move.
Barney offered to carry it all all
by himself
on the lone condition she marry him.
A few years later, after their formal relationship ended,
O'Hara wrote his wonderful poem, ironically one he would have made as long
as friendship could last if he could have written a poem that long.
Choko came by with her cell phone, effusive ebullience, & exotic look.
The young publisher, Scott Korb, as thrilled
to meet the legend as I was as thrilled to meet the legend,
went out with us afterward for a bottle of Cahors,
the "Black Wine of France," where we shared
stories of coming to writing,
our trip to Cannes, his living in Ireland,
the link between intelligence & consciousness,
intuition & the unconscious, the reiteration of his mission
to publish what is earnest & honest over cynical & ironic
reminding me of my distaste for Voltaire.
We parted in front of Nicola's on 84th with a firm handshake,
a willingness to face the events of today
with a language of risk & metamorphosis,
& one unforgettable image recalled from that morning
of the row of pollarded sycamores on 43^rd with branches reaching into the sky transformed into the grieving hands of Grünewald.

[from Slow Trains]

Drew Gardner - Watch Crystal Lucidrous Practice

2005-07-10T11:34:00.000-07:00

watch crystal ludicrous practice
that's where the birds drink their water

the flames seen through the wall's cracks
traffic gurgles, things

you never want to be
looking in the wrong direction
expecting

I left a bunch of
unsaid things to rot

smashed peaches--
turn off the radio

underneath the flood
the acceptance is on fire

soon to be born
overcast answer
wearing it
the hell out of town

[from Tool a Magazine]

Edmund Berrigan - Pastures of Plenty

2005-07-08T07:32:00.000-07:00

I want you to understand
that I don’t know why I’m here.
I was born in another country
with which I now have no association.
I was raised in a New York City
that has been wiped away by economics.
Much of my immediate family has
been removed from this life,
& much of my sense of experience
of this life has been removed with them,
making all of us new people.
I have let much of my sense of self
be informed by an art that is little used
& undervalued. I have sacrificed many
social relationships to these experiences,
which are inextricably linked, because
I come from a family of poets. The life
& values of a poet are antithetical to the
political landscape of the country
I live in, & no political machination
that I may inhabit remotely serves
the causes for which I live, though
I am bound to this land by knowledge of it.
I continue in poetry & song
because the experiences of my senses
are wholly held in these continuous
& inexplicable drives, their reason
& mine never idle or held to law or language.

[from Lungfull! magazine]

Sarah Rosenthal - Sonnet

2005-07-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

If joints

swell and limbs

wither, if you've been

rejected before

the cup arrived,

if a left

is made, if bedlam

comes from

Bethlehem—

buildings will weep for lost siblings.

kohl-circled eyes will stare above dusty cheeks.

the river water will resemble river water

but only under a certain sun.

a softened body will learn to tell time.

[from Blazevox]

Barry Schwabsky - Confession Without Confession

2005-07-02T15:57:00.000-07:00

I don't see the hour of seeing you.
But pupils polished dark on cold sun
and bare life. Your eyes

or mine? Fixed by sublime attention (planets
gazing at stars) the beautiful
grows nearer. Fractions

of glass where your planets gazing at the moon
find their own sequel: sunken
landscape. Sugar tossed in a lake.

[from nthposition]

Catherine Daly - Two Poems

2005-06-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

Slave

"How could a bitch-kitten like Toni
hold Val in thrall?"
This Side of Love

Accessory,
name bracelet,
extravagant anklet,
secondary

to the prime
suspect, the captivating
crime.

She keeps me on a leash so tight,
I can't breathe.

Supercilious,
ridiculous, Moanin' Low,

what do you deserve?
Haven't you humiliated

yourself
enough? What does it mean
to be punished?

Scarlet

A tomato is a fruit
dressed in red, a nightshade,
a love apple, but

a woman in a red dress is
the reader's digest condensed book of love,

a lover intoxicated by her listener
wielding the absolute warm gun,

a red pen
deleting.

[from No Tell Motel]

Sarah Manguso - Reverence

2005-06-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

Love not the rider but the old rider,
the ghost in the saddle: Obey that ghost.
A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip.
But we are not good horses.
We bolt. We stand still in bad weather.
We rely on things we know are unreliable,
it feels so good just to rely.
We are relied on.
But I do not know who knows that bad secret.
I do not see who sits astride my back,
who cuts my flank so lovingly on our way to the dark mountain.

[from Ploughshares]

Charles Bernstein - The Ballad of the Girlie Man

2005-06-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

The truth is hidden in a veil of tears
The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear
A democracy once proposed
Is slimmed and grimed again
By men with brute design
Who prefer hate to rime

Complexity's a four-letter word
For those who count by nots and haves
Who revile the facts of Darwin
To worship the truth according to Halliburton

The truth is hidden in a veil of tears
The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear

Thugs from hell have taken freedom's store
The rich get richer, the poor die quicker
& the only god that sanctions that
Is no god at all but rhetorical crap

So be a girly man
& take a gurly stand
Sing a gurly song
& dance with a girly sarong

Poetry will never win the war on terror
But neither will error abetted by error

We girly men are not afraid
Of uncertainty or reason or interdependence
We think before we fight, then think some more
Proclaim our faith in listening, in art, in compromise

So be a girly man
& sing this gurly song
Sissies & proud
That we would never lie our way to war

The girly men killed christ
So the platinum DVD says
The Jews & blacks & gays
Are still standing in the way

We're sorry we killed your god
A long, long time ago
But each dead solider in Iraq
Kills the god inside, the god that's still not dead.

The truth is hidden in a veil of tears
The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear

So be a girly man
& sing a gurly song
Take a gurly stand
& dance with a girly sarong

Thugs from hell have taken freedom's store
The rich get richer, the poor die quicker
& the only god that sanctions that
Is no god at all but rhetorical crap

So be a girly man
& sing this gurly song
Sissies & proud
That we would never lie our way to war

The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear
The truth is hidden in a veil of tears

[from Milk Magazine]

Lisa Jarnot - Additional Ode

2005-06-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

For the specialness of daylight
and the color of the sky
for the evidence of mammal forms
and all ferrets and the night,
for the fireflies distracted
made of crayons and the rain,
for the days of working workingness
and a facileness of themes,
for the finlandtude of spirits
that are fierce beside the cats,
for the rampant forms that are the cats,
made of warm flesh lined with fur,
for the solace that is warm fur flesh
that is everything alright
for the eventide of everything,
for the this and then and them.

[from MiPO]

John Ashbery - At North Farm

2005-06-27T02:02:00.000-07:00

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents,
through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

[from Dia Center]

Mary Koncel - Two Poems

2005-06-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

When the Babies Read The Book of the Dead

We can’t stop them. We say, "Babies, don't turn the page." But they try to sound out every word, gum each corner until it’s soft and sticky. We say, “Babies, look here—Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, a monarch butterfly wafting over a bed of red and white petunias.” The babies ignore us. They huddle together, drool across the cover. They like the pictures best—trees, man and shaggy dog together, the long, rocky trek against time. We try to distract the babies, tickle their round cherry chins, but they’re relentless. Their fingers, eyes, mouths, every bit of them so little but relentless. Sometimes we think the babies might not be ours. We could ask them, but we’re afraid. The babies don’t sleep at night. We hear them rocking upstairs beneath the crib, the book held between them like another prayer. We don’t know who to call.

When the Babies Discover Torque

We tell them over and over. “Babies, go to bed. Babies, wash your hands. Babies, don’t drink and drive.” They never listen. Inside the garage, soft heads bumping under the car hood like moths against a light bulb, they pass the tools between them. We decide to sing some nursery rhymes, remind them who they really are. “This little baby’s eating spark plugs, this little baby’s ripping out hoses, and this little baby’s thumping tie rods—whomp, whomp, whomp.” We think we should try to save them, but we’re not sure from what. Torque? The sultry lure of silicone grease and deep tread rubber? Between the heavy purr and rev of engine, in the sweet, low garble of baby talk, we hear them tell us something. “Blow it out your ass.” We step outside, close the door between us.

[from Tarpaulin Sky]

Reb Livingston - The Skirmish

2005-06-25T23:41:00.000-07:00

for TB

A crimson string bikini is a cruel flag
to raise to an older sister,
the stubby sister,
who always prided herself busty
in a family of tall slender women.
Once, months before, she carelessly said,
"You may be taller than me,
but I'll always have bigger breasts."
So wave your double D's on your 14-year-old frame.
Cheer your victory of long legs and bountiful bosoms.
Your sister has already formulated her next attack,
"In 40 years you'll be sitting on a bus,
your breasts sagging against your knees.
You'll be trying to avoid conversation
with the man with hoagie breath
while I'll be in Paris
in my slight, but still-tight bouncy frame,
getting laid."

[from Unpleasant Event Schedule]

Ron Padgett - Medical Crush

2005-06-25T16:28:00.000-07:00

Or heck
why not just, just
go over and tell her
how you feel,
you have a temperature
of 98.6 degrees F
and a pulse rate of
175 and blood
pressure at whoosh
whoosh whoosh oh way
too high the cuff
is going to explode!
—or get up and go
home and cry your
heart out and be
a hopeless wimp
for all I care.

[from Shampoo Poetry]

Heidi Lynn Staples - Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake

2005-06-24T11:36:00.000-07:00

Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake

My brother says it's great I like what am I
doing. Though. Focus. Get Practical. It's a hobby. So, I don't
speak to him for awhile. He keeps calling, please,

the message, he wants to read some of my work.
I'm writing things like "Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake."
I give it to him. Wait several weeks. He says it's great

I like what I'm doing. So, I say he can take care fake bear
torque cake off. He doesn't know take care fake bear
torque cake. He's a piece of take care fake bear

torque cake. I call him this and a lot of other things, even
when no one's around to listen. It gets so
bad, I can't stop recalling how mercilessly he take care

fake bear torque caked me. How he played cruel take
care fake bear torque cakes on me. How can I ever
find it in my take care fake bear torque cake to

take care fake bear torque cake him? Could I hold
a long-standing take care fake bear torque cake against
him, as long as I live? He is my big brother.

I do take care fake bear torque cake up to him.
I do take care fake bear torque cake him very much.
I do have to take care fake bear torque cake

how hard he works, how busy he is, 60+ hours a week
managing video stores, two kids in college, mortgage.
In the free-time he finds when I go for a visit he watches

take care fake bear torque cake ass sitcoms. He makes jokes
with his wife about how take care fake bear torque cake
swimsuit models are. He points at the t.v. He whistles.

She's not take care fake bear torque caking. I get the feeling
there's not a lot of take care fake bear torque cake happening.
Of course, they've been married a long time.

All couples have their take care fake bear torque cakes.
He got take care fake bear torque caked early. No college.
While I went on to study at the take care fake bear

torque cake level. Sometimes that feels weird. His house,
with a take care fake bear torque cake overlooking
a take care fake bear torque cake, is huge and lovely.

It's great. Getting out on the lake. Going
wherever. Storming around and around in aimless
high speed take care fake bear torque cakes across acres and acres

of deep dark take care fake bear torque cake. He loves it.

[from [from Unpleasant Event Schedule]]

Bob Hicok - Reparations

2005-06-23T19:29:00.000-07:00

REPARATIONS

A group of people look into the well. I lean over too,
we stare at each other upside down. There's a man
mannequin in the water. One of the people says
we should rescue him with a spear gun and rope, another
that we should ask a woman mannequin to make the first
feel lonely and capable of flight. But what if he's gay,
someone asks. I remind them of the oppressive condition
in which our hero lives, being, not even wood,
but a plastic designed to keep clothes from snagging.
As is often the case, we soon resent his misery,
lean back in the short grass and talk of angora sweaters
we've loved, of the expression mannequins perfect,
the one that says, my smile, I owe my smile to this shade
of burgundy. When I wake, the man mannequin
stands above me, dripping, his smooth crotch shining
in moonlight. It occurs to me we may have ruined
his privacy, and I want to sing him a song that says
how sorry I am, but the only sounds that come to mind
are of two cars smashing on the highway, and I wake
the man beside me, and we run head first at each other
to sing this song.

[from Octopus Magazine #5]

Matthea Harvey - Two Poems

2005-06-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

YOU'RE MISS READING

Engine:

All bright thought lay in future thought.
The coin was in the puddin hid.

Cod from the machine will not do,
said the dramaturg-turned-nutritionist.

Only the upper echelons could afford to be
nonchalant about it. They were, as in, oh.

It was the first time a lost Jocelyn
& a found Jocelyn had turned out

to be not one & the same.
The trial continued.

You're Miss Reading, aren't you?
                                                    Yes.
& you still refuse to name
the cake in question?

                                                  Earlier in the hearing, I considered
                                                  relenting, but now that you put it
                                                  that way--yes.

POEM INCLUDING THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD

The hologram hostas swung softly
in their macrame swing. If only

Alice would stop hitting her head
on the ceiling, but a body

Will Up. It was like croquet, really,
the way some ideas went through:

love triangle instead of lust-
isoceles, Mama flashing a mirror

so we'd find our way home.
Another shift of the kaleidscope

& a little girl is hunting
marbles beneath the trees &

Chairman Mao, so lean and mistrustful
is studying the plans for his heli-car.

The thing is, of course, where to land.

[from La Petite Zine]

Brian Clements - Forgiven in Providence

2005-06-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

Forgiven in Providence

“Keep reading,” she said. “Your voice pleases the violets and that story is full of vertebrate colors, which makes the ficus think of what it could have been.”

Just to see the chestnut of her mouth keep leaping from her lungs like that, I kept reading.

“Read another story,” she said. “Read one with little pieces of vignettes fallen from dogma, which is supposed to uncork something unexpected, like a life.”

“In April,” I began, “the ceremony begins with yellow if you live far enough south...”

She sighed. “Oh, that one... You know, I paid to see a fight, and, by God, I’m going to see a fight. What you’ve become is a crude excuse for license.”

And on it went like a marriage.

Forgiven in Providence, Part II

Each day it all sounds more and more like vaudeville. Dancing with the chickens, serenading the dining room table, role-playing scenarios where I am the bean and the computer is the giant.

But none of that compares to the mystery of doubt when you have the bad taste to live in a lover’s house. She takes the silence of the masses as an unalloyed chime from the bell tower.

Since we are stumbling toward a seed anyway, and since the title already forgave us, why not start an emergency? But if you point at a woman you attack her, because fingers are the devil, and because beneath all theory a plot is crying for mercy.

Forgiven in Providence, Part III

"Why don’t you cut up your anatomy,” she asked, “and reassemble it as a twisted zombie composer?”

And if she’d been kidding I might have considered it.

Once, the purpose of prayer was to guess. Then it was just tradition.

Forgiven in Providence, Part IV

I wanted to tell her a story, so I started in on the one about the chestnut of her mouth.

“Make like hydrogen,” she said. “Split.”

“But it’s changed,” I promised. “Now it’s all about how—after democracy didn’t free us, and the vaccine didn’t save us, and the garbage man turned out to be just a work around—we bought a new car.”

“I want to hear,” she pined, “about my noble childhood, and the religious fervor of bees. About the practice of the glider pilot and his fear.”

“A sonata is the window,” she continued, “the wind. You are just a guess. The lines the lake makes in its going away is not too normal an emotion. Tell me something wrong, something insignificant, like a poem...”

And I guess we’d had about enough talking at the point. There are too many things about people that can’t be prevented by sheepskin. Unfortunately, that’s when I started singing.

[from Slope]