Uut Poetry

spark plug cologne/ all over death star

Thu, 23 May 2013 13:40:50 -0400

spark plug cologne/ all over death star

A Hand Reaching A hand reaching to my cigarette— a...

Thu, 23 May 2013 13:30:17 -0400

A Hand Reaching

A hand reaching to my cigarette—
a condensational Ball in the Head
under one star
and individually sized
in its vast old oaken wine barrel.

I face myself like
waiver forms and cheetahs that move the sky,
sunshine somehow belting out simple contours
invested in the damps of the eye
repenting forever in the best way

because Lakers taste like
ices glassed without heat
and the awards are lumps of a tasteless
chorizo tripwired for geese-mating.

Sylvester’s swords, vug of brilliants,
correctly fucks a graduate
of world enough and tongue.

seed text: Solution Passage, by Clark Coolidge
art by franz falckenhaus

"They say automatic fire isn’t and nothing green in the snow sprouts anything, excepting the clank..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:41:46 -0400

“They say automatic fire isn’t and
nothing green in the snow sprouts
anything, excepting the clank and
sting of M1 clips”

- The Atlantic Block: 101st

"Styling over the flat in glance machine. Shown over and over again, the wobbles balance."

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:51:28 -0400

“Styling over the flat
in glance machine. Shown over and over again,
the wobbles balance.”

- Clark Coolidge

new Aufgang

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:45:21 -0400

new Aufgang

I just got floth-ed! I can feel the bristles all over me…

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:48:58 -0400

I just got floth-ed! I can feel the bristles all over me…

towards Keefer's.

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:42:55 -0400

cordeliagablewrites:

Just how American is the heat lamp,
defecting ants in his New York apartment?
They want just a photograph.

Do they look happy? Candidly, they
couldn’t figure it before
scrubbing the blank, however true.

The balding river reflects in his tomb,
is sitting. Slack suits adjust—yes,
everyone is dying for a bit of toast.

What are some academic lit or poetry journals based on the west coast?

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:41:41 -0400

What are some academic lit or poetry journals based on the west coast?

Allen Ginsberg’s Celestial Homework By Harriet Staff,...

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:59:52 -0400

Allen Ginsberg’s Celestial Homework
By Harriet Staff, poetryfoundation.org

We have our friends at the Paris Review blog to thank for pointing us to Open Culture where they’ve posted the celestial syllabus to Allen Ginsberg’s 1977 course at the Jack Kerouac School of Dis …

The Works of Love are Nevertheless Not the Works of Love He...

Wed, 22 May 2013 22:47:20 -0400

The Works of Love are Nevertheless Not the Works of Love

He engineered a strange loneliness
from the waist up,
part of the order of pure sound
that should plunge into temptation
but tenses the bourgeoisie and
holds up the huge doors.
Instantly the paintings all around you
knock my sad theme
in several ways
cinching to the marvelously altered night
like your cake, saved for them
but intrinsically a warmth,
which inflects a kind of death
with a hundred tongues.

seed text: Selected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
art by El gaio

Half and Half Project

Wed, 22 May 2013 22:39:00 -0400

I’ve been writing poems lately that put a new twist on a pair of (for me) old and reliable forms, namely, the Minimalist Instagram project and good-ol’ automatic writing. It’s a simple concept: write a line or half a line using a seed text (in the style of the Instagram and Bibliomancy project), then write a line or half a line in an automatic, semi-automatic or improvisational mode. These two processes occur alternately, but in general, the automatist strands should not be conceived in the “context” of the poem’s evolving shape. The automatic language may, however, deliberately continue and finish phrases syntactically (and vice versa). For example, in this poem I wrote “He engineered a strange,” then flipped to a random phrase in my source text, The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and got “loneliness.” Then I continued, “from the waist up, / part of the order…” then to the book for _”a pure sound.” Etc, generating the next several lines (italics are Rilke):

that should plunge into temptation
but tenses the bourgeoisie and
holds up the huge doors.

Instantly the paintings all around you
knock my sad theme
in several ways…

Proceed accordingly until you feel satisfied. Revise lightly, mostly punctuation. Embrace dissonance.

A word about the automatic writing. I’ve been thinking lately about the poets (Spicer, Mac Low, Coolidge, Perelman) who turn their mind into metaphorical radio tuners that listen to a “voice” in their head that is really the clamor of modern experience. Often this entails an artificial form of stimulation, like the Grand Piano project or other forms of “automatic listening.” The source is not conscious but neither is it subjective or expressive, in the sense of issuing from the writer’s ego. A fragmented, incoherent conversation is going on in the background noise of all our lives, and these poets attempt to record it. Something like this is what’s going on my microdreams. After a while, the “flow” of this voice gets easier to channel and becomes the touch-point for automatic writing. I’m sure some writers will know what I’m talking about. Anyone who is improvisational in any way also has a point of contact. Use this sense of “automatic” writing when writing for this project.

That’s it. Submit the results. Have fun.

All the half and half poems.

"Spring runs like a fuse through a wrinkled street the all quivers in the carbonated air"

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:33:19 -0400

“Spring runs like a fuse
through a wrinkled street
the all quivers
in the carbonated air”

- Bert Meyers

Language is a delightful phone to own on this Wednesday...

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:49:00 -0400

Language

is a delightful phone to own
on this Wednesday morning

and the green slopes
are so cut /

fresh as a weasel’s claw
or Caesar’s blood

art by aci2

hoar tats/ fame lately

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:26:27 -0400

hoar tats/ fame lately

a temperance/ of purged carts

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:26:03 -0400

a temperance/ of purged carts

"Cars lounge on their sides after years of running and mains pipes break cycles, bursting in fountain..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 21:15:08 -0400

“Cars lounge on their sides
after years of running
and mains pipes break cycles,
bursting in fountain joy.
The city trembles with reminded life.”

- Songs and the Forest: Shaken

infinitesplinters: How Things Happen on Earth and in...

Tue, 21 May 2013 21:13:00 -0400

infinitesplinters:

How Things Happen on Earth and in Time

Dressed in a wrinkled white shirt and jeans,
a meaningful explanation for everything that happened:
the leather coat had belonged to a Gestapo agent,
footsteps along the edge of a canal.

Then came the great surprise:
around this time, too, a seer appeared.
Sex, they agreed, was too wonderful,
the archetypes of human madness and cruelty

weren’t invented by the men of our day.
Despite everything, they had a pleasant day.
The young man covered his face;
the diseased truly bite whose dreams

are far ahead of our dreams (who had never
had talked to a woman). He looked at the one
who was masturbating for the hiding place to work
perfectly; the walls were covered with a red quilted

fabric, along a long, dark passageway, back and
forth, as he walked he looked at the buildings.
She repeated that the dead woman had no
identification, except they believed that his methods

and said something into his ear:
it was confirmed that the victim was
but our forebearers. Although there are people
who claim to have seen, he was no longer head

of the publishing house, as if waiting for him.
The dead woman had no identification.
Not only the German press, but also the French,
English, Dutch, and even American, except

Seed Text: 2666, Roberto Bolano
Art by Tim White, “Bring the Jubilee” (1975)

"In terms of process surrealism and ‘Language’ poetry frequently turn an ear to the murmur of the..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:02:16 -0400

“In terms of process surrealism and ‘Language’ poetry frequently turn an ear to the murmur of the mind as it talks to itself, often writing in a kind of practical shorthand, marked by continuous divergence, contradiction, association, and slippage. In this respect both have short-term memories that shift context every line or so, frustrating any attempt to isolate a particular subject or meaning. In both cases the text is read as an accumulation of poetic evidence after a certain antirational writing process has taken place rather than as a literature composed by a particular ego with a predetermined subject in mind.”

- Charles Borkuis

impious whole cookies

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:58:36 -0400

impious whole cookies

The Book The exciting past tense of opening a book whose...

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:32:00 -0400

The Book

The exciting past tense
of opening a book

whose consciousness is a fluke
of a team of rock stars.

All the disastrous left over cake
in the fridge!

Mailmen are sitting in the pond
awaiting resurrection.

art by recombiner