Please Write One of Each of the Following . . .

A “motion” poem
A spoiler poem
A giddyup poem
A natal poem
A stereo poem
A theriomorphic poem
An orthoscopic poem
A steroidal poem
An e-motion poem
A contested poem
A pledged poem
A poem in thyrsids
A poem in crenelated stanzas
A poem in frosted couplets
A poem in a namby-pamby register
A wombly poem
A poem containing empids
A poem in “stacked” stanzas
A septiva
An ocharina
A “peasant” mandalay
A choirette
A bivouaced poem
A lost poem
A “boomerang” poem
A cavernous poem
A poem generated via a Madurzial operation
A baronial snivella
A shackled sonnet
A list poem
A stop poem

Note on Notes on Notes on Conceptualisms

The central tenet of conceptual art is that the concept - the idea behind the art work - is more important than the work itself. If you have the idea that gave rise to the work, you don't need to see or read the result to "get" it.

Ergo, now that I know the concept behind conceptual art and writing pet se, it means that I don't have to read or see any conceptual art, or think about any conceptual writers or artists, or their critics, ever.

QED. . . . And what a relief!

Artist's Statement (?)

Last semester, I asked my workshop students to write an artist's statement or poetics statement, per their respective conceptions of either or both, in an idiom most everybody could understand. I did the exercise along with them, as I always do.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I write (currently) in 2 modes. One is like collage: I take a lot of documents, photos, & found material, select certain parts or quotations, then weave them together w/my own words to form a narrative. About history. These are long poems - book-length. They're very much in the modernist tradition of Ezra Pound, early Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser. Hopefully they're entertaining as well.

The other mode is the serial poem: longish poems, made up of smaller segments - "poemlets," you might say. These are written over a period of time - maybe a month, maybe a year. They are the opposite of the collage poems, in that these are very voice-based - a persona - who speaks in complete sentences, but they don't always make good sense. Sometimes perverse sense. These tend toard satire. They are influenced by the essays and novels of Joy Williams, a lot of contemporary US poets, and Hannah-Barbera cartoons form the 60s.*

In general, what I like best about poetry in the US today is that it can mean anything. Once upon a time, novels were novel . . .

* I've been calling these "f*d-up nature poems," but I think maybe the polite term nowadays is "necropastoral"?

Joe's Marginalia: from C.S. Giscombe's _Prairie Style_

re: “Lazy Man's Load”

lazy -- pleasure -- erotic -- lazy

make a coherent? soul / statement

End w/a story at the beginning --> one that predicts the future (as usual)
    - story as argument aimed at closure
    - can openness be coherent?

lazy --> insouciant --> servantless (--> pleasure)

Shape - same-ness > “low point” > lowest common denominator

story vs. impulse --> or are they really different?

Then a real story (within a story)
    - “I” connects himself w/Ishmaelites wandering

Let the “Let be be finale of seem” be
The outsider/outcast defines location. Who says “be”?

Pleasure as authority --> normative, prescriptive

Facts: (geography &) trains --> of thought --> region

“In-d” = “In-land”
Movement as pleasure (range as opportunity, not thrust)

Crossing town, solve a (future) equation, voice to complete
    - articulation vs. actual closure, results (pleasure that’s over)

Wants juxtaposition to be self-evident.
BUT > it’s the connections that make the story

Close in w/story --> an inquiry, not a conclusion
    - a lot of vacancy in a vacant lot
    - would be remiss to leave it at that?

Pleasure > desire > implies absence of object

Mixed feelings > geography shapes thoughts, language, as well as vice versa
    - what’s a town w/o its monster?
    - range requires people who range upon it

Meanings achieved avoid others, cancel others

Joe's "Marginalia": _Humanimal_, by Bhanu Kapil

section 43

What is a companion text? A feral text? A companion animal, a companion dad. A memory of the past = a reanimation of the corpses. His legs smashed up in a beating, hers by the Reverend Doctor (or vice versa). His coarse, black hair didn’t fit the picture, so he put his seal skin back on and dove into the sea. Skin is always exposed - “where is that protection that I needed?” Why can’t everyone’s be the color of the sky? Wasn’t somebody’s, on Star Trek? Then there’s Blue Man Group, with their faux-feral minstrel show. But a monster hybrid cyborg leg has silver chunks. Diving in makes one invisible > the jungle as womb, the sea as mother (again), the photo as frame. O to be a geometrical figure, a punctual self. A white dot wouldn’t even show up against the sand. I don’t need you to count my legs, Sethe said.

section 56

Planting a child in roots and pray for rain - abandon her in a room or a root. Sounds of people, sounds of seagulls. All these abandoned kids: Moses, Rom ‘n’ Rem, fairy tale princesses’ mistaken identities. Or a standing question, a standing wave. “She” is immortal, silver cyborg, invincibly rising up from the earth of which she is also part. Going into the woods, away from the people, is the safe way, pace Hansel and Gretel. The writer is her own fairy godmother. Her father’s mother at the end. The invisibility of it all - in the jungles, the waves. Don’t blink or you’ll miss her.

section 58

Rewrite her. Make it all tropically and then it will come out, make a nest of rough black hair. Lumbering like a selkie on dry land, slow. She is watching herself, her psyche, in a muse-ment. Something there is about an orphan girl. When you write her name, she will appear.

Joe's Marginalia: _The Lust of Unsentimental Waters_, by Rosa Alcalá

Re: "Safe Distance":

Safe from what or whom?
What we think we know . . .
We are split - distant from
ourselves?

History shapes our bodies (ask someone who was whipped or branded). And our bodies are a history (ask someone who is old).

Is the body a museum - of bad habits, shrapnel, treasures?
Who's the looter then?
"You will destroy an empire," the oracle said - He thought it meant someone else's --

I dunno - an empire as pawn-shop does pretty well . . .

No love is safe, period.
Lack of imagination = pawned ideas?
a heap of secondhand broken images

We're "working out patterns" wreading this poem

war and translation often go together --> & the former can be metaphor for the latter

the sensitivities are lost in translations, as "I don't know but what . . .": the stranger will never use the same words

As if war is war; the body, physical and not a trope.
Who wants to hear that in a poem??
But we suspect it might be true - that 1400 people can die in a factory collapse. Due to negligence and intimidation.

Just not here.

If you really felt that, how stay sane?
At best, a mere conversation.

"Cancer is my default horror" --> the body's history splitting it apart

(sex is always news)

the body politic as real thing

people are relationships, singly or in groups

can't we hide in metaphor, please?

Go away, Myself!
call me up or out --
carry me over into
a place I've never seen.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Re: "Sea Body":

Those are pearls that were his eyes and wouldn't he have wanted to move the harbor at will, rather than be rich and strange five leagues under?

"This" can only refer to what's already here - so is it my internal compass? My faulty "moral compass" wiggling its point?

"North is whatever direction is in front of me"

This poem is going south - slip-slidin away, maybe

Experiment often takes you where you didn't think you'd go --> dangerous for the single-minded, the Ahab who will get sucked under into the drink from his own rigid steps

My what bright fish you are - finding the goodies of the deeps (unconscious?)

The water is waiting and wants you > "wreck" suggests "ship" (and vice versa?)

Davy Jones' Locker is another dog's kitchen cabinet
The gods made their victims into stars

Is "this" wreading "coming home"?
Or is home coming to me?

This is a poem about love
This is a poem about getting old
This is a poem about love getting old
growing

In Which I Travesty a Canonical Roman Poem

 

1

Sweet cheap wine, taste

with woodruff and berries and fingers

blood-red tulpen    snow-white, too

not snow-white snow –

woo-hoo     woo-hoo

Tantalizing green sets off

redbud seams in draws –

(It’s only natural to love the new

(those who get old r creepy

So black or fair me laddie-o

the ladies all come courtin’

Corinna fair and Paddy-o

with Lycidas are sportin’ –

(woo-hoo, &c.)

Birdy-snake / birdy-snake / birdy-snake

over-under-over-under-over-und

fluttering parti-colored spokes

All that happens tomorrow &

tomorrow,

woo-hoo.

When we play the poem down again,

half-empty or half-full,

then half nothing,

the maypole ribbons, guy-wires

of th’universal antenna, the dick,            

wind down, alas, as well. 

All’s well            ah well,

Woo-hoo.

2

Finally, a toasty breeze!  instead of

freezing my ass off in a fricking gale –

Flowery foresters are out, I’m out,

everyone’s out to each other,

fast in a bass boat or walkin the dog

Cytherean Venus and the Nymphs,

decked out as hippie chicks, play

an outdoor gig – or some Ultimate –

while her sucker husband

has the day shift in the boiler room

nobody wears lilac, myrtle –

none of that sissy stuff 'round here –

but if they did, they’d do it now.

Jesus, stop sacrificing for once

in your life!  It’s nice – play ball!

Soon enough the ump of all

will call you out at home    hence

delayed gratification means an ox-eye,

moron.     So: retire immediately, Joe –

before you retire for good,

a weirdo ghost, to a flickering home

from whose bourn you don’t get back

your winnings, winings, whinings,

or self.  Nothin but sixes and tens

then – and no randy dallying, sure.

Sheesh - that was fast!

My review of The First Flag, by Sarah Fox, is already "up" at Tarpaulin Sky. Shazam!

Hadara Bar-Nadav is my "Pick of the Week" at KWH

The fabulous folks at Knox Writers House asked me to choose the "Pick of the Week" from amongst their voluminous archive of poets' reading their work. So many possibilities! I ended up choosing Hadara Bar-Nadav's poem "Lullaby (with Exit Sign)," which is also the title of her new collection. See what you think!

Joe's Marginalia: in THE FIRST FLAG, by Sarah Fox

So these are the symbols?

Dictated poetry?

ergo political

mother as danger

male parthenogenesis

fecundity

the transformation

into mother

a monster?

hierarchical differences

human / earth

body replaces

bone cage

“A Vision in a Dream”

wedding

like Plath

(how she wrote not

how you think she wrote)

one must handle words as neonates

“essay”

dispersion indeed

Why^TM?

How pronounce “Pwah!”?

combines two strains

i.e., would

I-Ching hexagrams

Fuck-u poem

This one more Antin [David] than Antler?

pleasantly chatty a la O’Hara

Is this transitional?

Footnote Numbers in Body Text

“after completion”

Kristeva, Irigaray / Klein, Jung

reader

relation of history to myth?

Paradoxes and Oxymorons

great!

SP;QR

of poems?

hopeful vision –

but not “beyond gender”

image+text

from “I cut”

like anatomy drawings

womb

tomb

C-section

resists further marking

D.E.S.

* father

re-wombing

electrical – cyborg

horses

Return of Patriarchy

Herr Doktor-Vater

shades of Iatrogenic --> spec-po

All one dream?

Aftermath

Ursula > devouring mother

shadow(s)

crows

Future

“medicine” & “poison”

coma – real?

comma – yes

re-birthing

+ dead babies

rein-

carnation

Alchemical cycle

centered

Object Relations – Projective Identification

                Tower – Cauldron

[chiasmus across the Comma (cut)?]

tower/well --> penis as inside-out vagina

story

yikes!

Brenda-Coultasy direct address

what is it w/horses?

Do they exist outside

human gender-codes?

Yes and no.

& bears

not nec. good

for the soul – or body

Lets things be overdetermined

(in the original (psychoanalytic) sense.

Jung was a science-making daddy.

like the deer carcass

dream + waking intermingled

once upon a

lots of Rome here

ha!

what’s time got to do with it?

Mr. Honey is creeping me out, here

mortality

that sounds like time

ref. to “Comma”

back to the tone of parts 1 & 2

satire

Dante’s big rosebud

Epona + Sequanna

D.E.S.

yikes

Vicuñesque

the glowing teeth earlier

Father with a Thousand Faces

found deer parts

turning point

present tense

buck to her doe

conclude & contain

ends w/real placenta

as it must