Poetry is Not A Profession: A Few Thoughts on The Poem Assessor
Carina, montevidayo.comSo I went off the internet for like a day yesterday because I had sad friends scattered throughout the city and I thought I could make better use of my time in cheering them up than in sitting at a desk and staring at a computer screen. I was righ…
Interview with Joyelle McSweeney
John Madera, bigother.comMadera: Many of the fictions in Salamandrine: 8 Gothics engage mothers, motherhood, and the Mother as figurations, sets of attitudes, as loci of language, as interlocutors discussing other mothers. Would you talk about what I…
It’s A Vice, Vice Summer: Vice Magazine’s Summer Reading Lists
Harriet Staff, poetryfoundation.orgAt Vice, Blake Butler has curated an array of summer reading lists from fiction writers and poets called “What Are These Freaks Reading?” Scope it out!It includes a set of summer reads from poets, Claire Donato and Ben Mirov. Read their pic…
What Ben Mirov reads
You Too Can Learn to Write Surrealist Poetry
Harriet Staff, poetryfoundation.orgNo, it’s not bootcamp, but it is a fantastic way to automate the poetry side of your brain. This Thursday the Annex at Spudnik Press is offering a workshop in surrealist poetry.Surrealist writers employed numerous approaches in order to create new…
And there goes my idea…
[video]
jungleistic fleck ermines
I cannot begin this day by thinking about a leopard
or my sisters-in-law, who dance and sell drinks
and graduate. Every other person’s mom
is asking me questions about life, minutia:
How long will it take? What are waves? May I eat this
gluten-free snack? But art is more than a pencil
circling casually in the air. Behind the mask
is an mp3 of chirping crickets, playing on repeat.
Though the rest of the population says, “What’s up!”
in expressionless tonality, you remain kinder than a slug
on a walking stick leaning against Grandpa’s cabin
in the Ozarks. I fish out a dollar: it is
a striking new metal discovered in the sand
of a circus tent. Who can understand all this?
We refer to the Book of Sharing, and it says
buttons are homeless, the heavens are descending
and wellsprings of justice are hidden in the prince’s mouth.
art by franz falckenhaus
BicycleSPACE Summer Blockbuster Bicycle Haiku (Baiku) -
Fellow Tumblrs, you can show your support for me by going to the link above and Voting (not liking) my “baiku” for this little contest that ends today.
Here’s a couple other “baiku” that didn’t make it in:
down-shifting up the
MBT after happy hour
on H street
fistpumping June wind
between Lincoln & Georgetown—
found the trail at last
Sometimes riding in the city can make you feel like you’re the star of your own action movie! Submit a bicycle haiku (baiku) that details your exciting summer adventures. The poem with the most votes will get a $25 gift card! Be DC’s next bike poet laureate!
At the Maoist Institute of Greenland, italics
stand upright but tip over effortlessly. In the
break room scroungers wag summer tongues
at starving artists stranded in south Georgia.
Twelve eggshells laid dollars on the bed.
A banquet procured a pittance of loaves
to know what it’s like to be stepped on.
It wept inconsolably.
Can I get a show of hands from those thinking
the world could use a giant sippy cup?
The stars descend from the heavens
and drizzle themselves in mustard. Gravy’s
far too boss. Helen from Dover writes
“my tube socks are climbing up my limbs”
but I fear she has fashioned a switch.
Let’s refine disinterest to agnostic levels;
when their khaki teeth silken we go to war.
I’ll wear a handshaking face.
For the past seven years I’ve looked at him
saying ‘hello’ at a quarter past ten and
I am sick to death of it.
Incredibly, the last line wrote itself!
300 square feet will fit twenty sociopaths,
give or take a micro fridge and the friction
knowing you’re a mixed bag of raw sausage.
Confer with the metaverse, oh trailer park monk!
Put on this sleeve, you are filthy.
Practice tact in the theater of sex.
fountains that / less than a fate cantina
not sure how/ the gender watch
a compression-laced hurry
A collaboration with Dr Gibberyshrooms using the Half and Half method and the same seed text, “The Black Cat,” by Edgar Allan Poe
humanity disturbed me,
tormented gentlemen concealing brute gallows,
blindly childish and contemptuously wretched,
perverseness plunged into bosom of Agony of Death!
One morning,
my spirit permitted myself
to be alone in bed,
abandoned by intoxicated merchandize,
plastering found mercy,
a disease of circumstances infancy,
upon the ruins arising from Pluto’s
supreme folly, I quivered
innocence as suspicions decayed voice,
a future embarrassment restrained by
guilelessness reverberation.
The hangman spectators,
howl triumph in hideous outbursts,
absolute horror,
deprived of remorse,
hatred haunts mans conscience,
imperfect animal scarcely marvelous,
stupefied in violently loathing the presence of god,
sobbing at length,
for inhuman damnation,
held broken,
such as a corpse.
I am seduced,
by the swooning arms
of the solitary
tomb.
-
Uut
Pluto was a telescope of tears
adrift on a nautilus, a star contributing to the
the pressure of torments such as these:
straight razors we sometimes like to eat,
the feeble remnant of the good within me,
shaken beliefs and cornerstones,
and loathsome caresses.
Nor is a ham sandwich a kind of action
perhaps unvanished by slow degrees.
I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of
castaways and bank robbers and bok choy
and the slamdunk of oratory
have long and sharp claws in my dress.
It is impossible to describe, or to imagine
Sikhs with scissors, sorters-out of the
primary faculties, or
shrouds intent on factory violence.
Delicately, it followed my footsteps,
an indefinite splotch of white
for a husband. And on the farthest shore
I looked around triumphantly: the flatness
of active neurons firing imperially in my brain,
and the cat I had destroyed
concealing my body.
art by holly pilot
“We rise, but toward what sun?
We live, but the Debt-Men hold the title.”
— The Annotated Life: Gentrify Your Mind
Full dawn steaming
into new-day birdsong,
earth spinning
shrugging off the days —
Pull up a chair and relax a’while
as our youth careens entropically,
expanding like sea-foam fading
on a long
sand bar.
.