Three new poems (not newly written, just newly published) on Entropy Magazine's Blackcrackle. Including Essential Oil, prompted by the beloved Bert Brecht:
Blog originally designed for the cruelest month, when I scratch out a poem a day in order to stay connected to Robin Reagler. Now also a repository for my matters poetry. (Ab Chaos Poesis is a riff on Ab Chaos Lex, which is Joyce's joke on the catholic motto, ab chaos ordo.) (No relation to the metal band which is top fifty results of a 2020 google search to check the latin.)
10 July 2018
22 April 2018
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
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.
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.....
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.
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?....
11 September 2017
21 April 2017
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."
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."
01 April 2017
25 May 2016
My First Revolutionary
My first revolutionary was Mario Savio. I was fifteen, it was 1977,
and we met in a book that was lying around the house I grew up in in
Houston.
[I met all my revolutionaries in books, which might hint that I’ve
never been arrested.] [Never.]
Mario was dark and handsome and a leader of Berkeley’s FSM, or Free
Speech Movement. A bright son of Italian immigrants, his first arrest was at a
1964 protest against the San Francisco Hotel Association, which only hired
blacks for menial jobs. He spent that summer in the south registering black
voters and returned to learn that his university was banning political speech
on campus. It seems hard to believe now—or maybe not. (Though I’m not one to
believe that trigger warnings are another kind of ban, they did come to mind.)
Anyway. On one December afternoon in 1964, Savio found himself in the
middle of a protest about this speech ban, the ouster of a few students, and
the disbanding of a few groups. So, after considerately imploring his listeners
not to harass the union workers then painting the administration building and
not joining their strike, he jumped on to a car and made a speech,
a speech printed in that book in my mother’s house in 1977, a
speech now featured on AP history tests. Today I found his words spliced into a Linkin Park song called
“Wretches and Kings,” and some Bernie-or-busters are enjoying the video of the speech
that’s here on YouTube, with a Marxist analogy that all can
understand, claiming Berkeley’s board were the factory managers, its faculty
were the employees, and the students were the raw materials being processed. Savio
knew that no student wants to turn into a product, and he said so beautifully
from the top of a car:
There is a time when the operation of
the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take
part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies
upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus,
and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who
run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be
prevented from working at all!
How can a sixteen year
old gal not love a guy like that? I love him still. This semester, I assigned
Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” as a text in a freshman comp class and saw what
I’d never quite realized. You’ll see it for yourself:
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction
of the machine of government, let it go...perchance it will wear smooth -
certainly the machine will wear out... If it is of such a nature that it
requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the
law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
I guess Savio had
been flipping through his Thoreau that semester.
Mario
Savio ended up as a university “lecturer”—basically an adjunct, like me, and
died at 53 in 1996.
01 May 2016
02 April 2016
01 April 2016
Poetry Mons Begins
Some years
Didn’t want any more surprises
on the couch
with dog
a three-word Moroccan spice
spring
came today it was just a click like
the future’s snapped fingers
like how she does she does some years
like she didn’t want to miss poetry
month either party
girl
meanwhile today’s code continues
shredding yesterday’s careful knit
someone has to be
be the last to know
decipher one long walk
city swanning until he stepped
on the trick door in the sidewalk
and dropped quick, scraped leg,
rust spot on the corduroys and
clambering up, brushing and
why did you laugh, he said
but I had waited and waited.
17 February 2016
New Poem on Word Riot
I've got a new poem up on Word Riot. Thanks to the editors and to David Letterman.
15 February 2016
23 August 2015
"Vienna's Kunstkammer to Reopen" is up on The Human
Very cool crime-writing issue of The Human Journal, with Susan Rich as poetry editor. (As opposed to the crime-committing issue, which would be interesting, too.) My poem, begun after a press party for the city of Vienna a few years back, is here.
I've got a poem in the wonderful Tinderbox Poetry Journal: my own Nature Poem (2)
There are lots and lots of good poems in this issue of Tinderbox, so go exploring here. My poem, which was begun on this blog during a poem-a-day April, is here.
05 July 2015
Poem up on Villainess Press The Plot
My "Five Volvos In and Out of Texas" is up on Villainess Press.
19 May 2015
"Fleetwood Mac," written during NaPoWriMo 2014, is up on Cross Review
Cross Review is a groovy little lit magazine and reading series in New Jersey, and the good editors took my poem, "Fleetwood Mac."
15 April 2015
09 April 2015
08 April 2015
03 April 2015
A little Diane di Prima to Prime the Pumps
REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #19 by Diane di Prima
(for The Poor People’s Campaign)
if what you want is jobs
for everyone, you are still the enemy,
you have not thought thru, clearly
what that means
//
if what you want is housing,
industry (G.E. on the Navaho reservation)
a car for everyone, garage, refrigerator,
TV, more plumbing, scientific
freeways, you are still
the enemy, you have chosen
to sacrifice the planet for a few years of some
science fiction Utopia, if what you want
//
still is, or can be, schools
where all our kids are pushed into one shape, are taught
it’s better to be ‘American’ than black
or Indian, or Jap, or PR, where Dick
and Jane become and are the dream, do you
look like Dick’s father, don’t you think your kid
secretly wishes you did
//
if what you want
is clinics where the AMA
can feed you pills to keep you weak, or sterile
shoot germs into your kids, while Mercke & Co
grows richer
if you want
free psychiatric help for everyone
so that the shrinks
pimps for this decadence, can make
it flower for us, if you want
if you still want a piece
a small piece of suburbia, green lawn
laid down by the square foot
color TV, whose radiant energy
kills brain cells, whose subliminal ads
brainwash your children, have taken over
your dreams
//
degrees from universities which are nothing
more than slum landlords, festering sinks
of lies, so you too can go forth
and lie to others on some greeny campus
//
THEN YOU ARE STILL
THE ENEMY, you are selling
yourself short, remember
you can have what you ask for, ask for
everything
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