14 May 2020

"Delphi" recorded for the magicians at Missing Witches.

I sent my old poem "Delphi," about Vestal Virgins, to Risa and Amy at Missing Witches and they clapped it on the end of their Beltane May Day episode. (That's the very very very end.) Nice to have it in a magic feminist realm, though it was published long ago on a poetry site.... The poetry site seems to have disappeared my poem, sadly. Check out the episode here--and visit the podcasters' fantastic back catalog. Missing Witches are definitely doing the goddess' work. 

30 January 2019

Wicked Stepmother Poem up on Mom Egg Review

The Stepdaughters Are the Wicked Ones

Scalding sand kicked to cool, cruel clouds
roll past, white on light and happy
giddy girls, volleyball reddening wrists.
Spike it, one cries. To the side, new wife...

29 November 2018

Poem on Indolent Books' What Rough Beast

Got a poem published on Indolent Books' What Rough Beast, and I'm happy about that. Even though I didn't know until just now and it was up in September.

Linked here, the poem is called, "A few of the words," and it begins:

A few of the words
Here’s some language: sweet land, liberty.
Here’s a location we call mine. The mind.
Here’s a famous river in the back of the lot
just past the original song. Rocky banks
risky slope. Follow it north, pilgrim,
to where it runs at a trickle. Keep
going. The philosopher calls nationalism
irrational – sweet land sweet song –
but they made a word for it.

10 July 2018

3 New Poems on Blackcrackle (via Entropy Magazine)

Three new poems (not newly written, just newly published) on Entropy Magazine's Blackcrackle. Including Essential Oil, prompted by the beloved Bert Brecht:


11 April 2018

First Avenue after/for Rae Armantrout

First Avenue
            after/for Rae Armantrout

(the) silence 
under peerless 
vehicle noise 

seems like 
the only 
is  

doctor says 
you had 
a heart attack 

when 
(you ask)

(busy year)

*
those bricks red 
for the office 
official order
for ignoring

speed past 

economics 
interrupt this poem 

child places bow 
in hair 
wails: but I can’t 
pay the rent 

still

*
Harvard says 
half of all heart attacks 
remain unrecognized

you’re not
so bad

didn’t mind
constant honking

or hated it            

03 April 2018

2/30

A little Robin, a little Emerald Tablet, a little Hondo

I look up. I think incandescently 
about my sister’s night sky app
that clarified the constellations 
from that dark corner in Texas
April night gathered outside 
                  here a true explanation
                  concerning which there 
                  can be no doubt:
as above, so below 
the secret humming beneath the secret 

I look up. I think who grouped them 
where they lay who drew ram, lion, 
water bearer come to bring needed nectar 
thirsty thirsty as we’ve been    are     who 
stole a world from us, corralling stars
                  to make the miracle 
of the one thing 
look up

NaPoWriMo -- not quite in the spirit here.

A Freud erasure: page 248 "Mourning and Melancholia" 2018...


09 February 2018

Three of my poems in Empty Mirror

Happy day: Empty Mirror has published three poems.

It includes my poem for Vito Acconci. It's also by him, being largely his words from a talk he gave at MoMA a few years ago.

RIP Vito. And thank you, Denise Enck.

You’re alone in a room you have nothing

for (and by) Vito Acconci
When I started out as a poet
didn’t want abstraction
abstraction used
by religion
politics
didn’t want any of that.....

18 October 2017

Considering Translation and Cultural Appropriation because of my class on Plagiarism

Brings us to Nietzsche in The Gay Science: 

One can gauge the degree of the historical sense an age possesses by the manner in which it translates texts and by the manner in which it seeks to incorporate past epochs and books into its own being. Corneille’s Frenchmen — and even those of the Revolution — took hold of Roman antiquity in a manner that we — thanks to our more refined sense of history — would no longer have the courage to employ. And then Roman antiquity itself: how violently, and at the same time how naively, it pressed its hand upon everything good and sublime in the older periods of ancient Greece! Consider how the Romans translated this material to suit their own age … Horace, off and on, translated Alcaeus or Archilochus; Propertius translated Callimachus and Philetas …. How little concern these translators had for this or that experience by the actual creator who had imbued his poems with symbols of such experiences! As poets, they were averse to the antiquarian inquisitive spirit that precedes the historical sense. As poets they did not recognize the existence of the purely personal images and names of anything that served as the national costume or mask of a city … and therefore immediately replaced all this by present realities and by things Roman. … These poet translators did not know the pleasure of the historical sense; anything past and alien was an irritant to them, and as Romans they considered it to be nothing but a stimulus for yet another Roman conquest. In those days, indeed, to translate meant to conquer….”

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Problem of Translation” in Theories of Translation, 68–69. Quoted in this essay by V. Joshua Adams on NonSite.org

15 September 2017

And "Dear Ivanka" (or #dearIvanka) -- written when I was wondering why anyone considered the first daughter as a possible progressive in the cavern of our ugly ugly present administration


Super cool Rise Up Review published my "Dear Ivanka" poem, which begins with a quotation from Albert Woodfox and the lines:

How long and deeply I dreamed of being
a white lady. How distinctly I wanted 
to be tall and blonde like a pageant winner....


Another poem from April made it into Matter

(Oh the implications of this title.)Here is something from poem-a-day 2017, revised and in the world -- about family, politics, and family politics. It's called "Some Curses."


On summer barbecue nights, family nights

when the grandfather raised his voice
called damnation, was he saying damn nation?....

18 April 2017

One of last year's NaPoWriMo pieces published.

Did you know there were many nudist resorts in Palm Springs? Now you do.

If I could, I would change the second two lines of this poem pretty specifically.

But since it's on the fabulous Juked, I must have done something right. Here is "Palm Springs."