Poem a Day? . . . Why Bother?

Here are some comments from a poet friend who gave me permission to "publish this as [I] desire." Since I have nothing to say, why not! Here 'tis:

"...writing a poem a day in april seems somehow, to me, using time and space for words best left unsaid. maybe too, that is why my 'collected' poems would be somewhat slim. So fewer good and fewer bad poems for the world to ignore.

"Lang po discussions, unless you are academically attached i.e. a phd or something...are to me a dead end and same for flarf which will be the lang po of the 2020's in academia. there is no other 'school' today to kick around...is there...vispo or graffitipo or school of quietudepo or poetrymagpo are equally invisible."

[full disclosure: I have in fact been writing a poem each day this month (some of which have appeared in these e-pages), and I too think it's pretty silly. But a fun game. So let a thousand flowers gustibus! Oh - and I realized that, for the rest of my life, I never will know what it's like not to have a Ph.D., which is kinda scary.]

Still Alive

I haven't written anything on this blog lately, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm dead. I am recovering from stomach flu, however, which is the next best thing. I was at least going to show you another one of my canadian rabbits before I crawl back into bed, but Bloogle won't allow it today, for some reason. So how about a found poem instead?

“We sight cast to tailing reds
a 25-inch west-side

caught on a popper. Waters
support double digit days,

vast unpressured flats,
thick seagrass meadows.”

Today felt like the first day of spring of the rest of your life.

Essay on the Allegorical Uses of Syntax

for bpNichol (and others)

The capitalization of Gneiss
Exiled from the capital
Capitol the capital of Speedy

Plot more than scheme
Story more than plot
History more read than blue

Poetry being at a dead
End time being til no
One listens to poetry save

Golden crowned sparrow
Spavined fools gold
Arrow downed having

Running while spitting
Pissing altogether winds
Digging remember hind

Objects known by shadow
Play deep reality plow
Down use values fucked

Up rock chuck hawk chalks
Up subject verbs object
To capitalize on plot schemes

Poems than none other is
looks at it when reading
Don’t say jay nay pa stop

An H say

Of Rabbit Ideologues

Fig. 3: Robbe-Grillet returns to the scene of his Breton childhood en forme de pooka.

He rises on haunches and speaks the following:

"Ideology, always masked, changes its face with ease. It's a hydra-headed mirror: whenever one head is cut off it soon springs up again, presenting the adversary with his true face in the mirror, which he believed he had defeated. Have a nice day."

Personal Poem

Every day I become more like me.
I’m about to be killed, right?

damaged persons never forgive(n) - ?
More on this theme later.

Your money will run out before
your life, making suicide

unnecessary. In the mean time,
don’t touch me I’m radioactive

with a half-ass life
60 million years.

Poetry as an Instrument of Social Change

"Socialist Kate Richards O’Hare, speaking in North Dakota in July of 1917, said, it was reported, that ‘the women of the United States were nothing more nor less than brood sows, to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer.’ She was arrested [under the Espionage Act – still in force, BTW], tried, found guilty, and sentenced to five years in the Missouri state penitentiary. In prison she continued to fight. When she and fellow [sic] prisoners protested the lack of air, because the window above the cell block was kept shut, she was pulled out in the corridor by guards for punishment. In her hand she was carrying a book of poems, and as she was dragged out she flung the book up at the window and broke it, the fresh air streaming in, her fellow prisoners cheering.” [H. Zinn, A People’s History of the United States]