Motherland on What Rough Beast

A poem about the family politics has been up on Indolent Books' What Rough Beast for a while. When I say "family politics," I mean mother's politics, and the poem is called "Motherland." I don't think she'd have survived the last few years. I'm awfully hard on her here, as I often was. No doubt that's why it took me so long to post. It's linked here and begins:

Motherland

Mother was a party girl—volunteered
for Dems, loved her U.S. history—and
I’m sort of a party girl, and yesterday
at a get-out-the-vote phone bank
I spotted her across the room for a split—
just a quick—the old ugliness dropped
away. She must’ve rotted by now, the witch,
but this year friends bring her up. How
she drew us near to argue, debate,
to rap on her principles, her America.
But any fine idea can veer off the path,
a child astray, blue-white disappointment....

Lyn Hejinian on workshops and being "better than I am" and not falling back

Listen to Lyn Hejinian giving a Harvard Woodberry Lecture called Reinventing the Workshop. This occurred in 2014, and she clarifies that she isn't interested in workshops for the poet who speaks from his or her heart, though "profound experience" and "astute observation" are favorably mentioned. In contrast, she spends a lot of time on so-called procedural methods of making poems. These are poems in which the author function gets pushed out of primacy. (My heart!) (We are late to all the parties.) 

On Harvard's site, she is quoted on this philosophy of a communal poesis--or the questioning of authorship--that constitutes the reinvention of the workshop in her lecture. Somewhere else, apparently, she has written,

"The elements of expertise and inspiration that writers seek, whether in solitude or in the contexts of a workshop, are largely assumed to be requisite tools of an individual who can acquire and use them: the author. This workshop will query that assumption, and offer terms for imagining modes of composition in which authorship becomes a dubious proposition, and the grounds for establishing an aesthetic event become communal."

In the lecture, she says about the same thing, but differently. 

After she has run through the Jackson Mac Low, Clark Coolidge and Caroline Bergvall work and created a group assignment for the audience--all recommended--the audience wants to pin her down to her own work. How does she, Lyn Hejinian, "establish" "an aesthetic event"?

Naturally she is most interesting here. A little hemming and hawing. A discussion of one collaboration (with a visual artist) that didn't work, and of one with a poet that did. Finally she says (admits), "I have various ways of pushing myself out of the way in order to make work that's better than I am."

A student asks the million-dollar question: what is her "criteria" for recognizing that betterness?

A brief glance heavenward, then: "That I don't fall back on motifs where I'm just repeating myself or echoing what I was raised to think of like mellifluous sounds." 

Aha. Of course, it's hard not to fall back on the old sounds, our ideas of sounds, not to mention our ideas of ideas.  But okay. 

Stephanie Strickland's collection "How the Universe Is Made"

After a lot of reading, a lot of researching, and a lot of googling, I wrote a review of Stephanie Strickland's How the Universe Is Made: Poems new and selected 1985-2019. The more I learned about the poems, the more impressed I grew with the entire project, which I construe as hyper-feminist. Though Stephanie is also a digital writer/artist, and though she often says that a work that is in book form and electronic form thereby contains both--that is, the one or the other is not the entire work of art--this book is a fantastic stand-alone piece.

In a style that is often witty and always humblingly erudite, Stephanie Strickland pits poetry against the wave patterns of our world. She battles our mental, physical and spiritual incarceration in culture—the “ferocious / self-completing / sentences / exerting control.”

My review, "On Slipping Code," is up at Heavy Feather Review. 

Carte du Tendre

A love-map, called Carte du Tendre, on the Poetry Project's e-zine, “To hear all the sky and the map”: Lines of Mapping.

(P.S. This is the truth about marriage.)

Review of Sarah Sarai's Book: That Strapless Bra in Heaven

I loved reviewing Sarah Sarai's new book, That Strapless Bra in Heaven. The review is on Heavy Feather Review and you can buy the book here. 

"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. 

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...

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.

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:

P 165 #explodethelogic

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            

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...

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.....

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.