May 2013
13 posts
2 tags
I Read: "Rewilding," Jasmine Dreame Wagner, and...
P.S. I liked both of these things.
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Violent assonance began to overwhelm me,
because I began thinking about Hopkins, too,
little shrimp depressed in a land, making wax
out of himself, dressed up, turning bones to milk
in the small channels of his innards. So, yeah, this document, this contest. Was I pleased?
I was pleased. Maybe I’ve read it before.
I was followed on Twitter. Thunder,...
single462 asked: are u a girl
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I Read:...
The point is that you’re not clairvoyant,
you’re sitting at a dinner table
just saying stuff for no reason. The avenue of retreat should remain closed off.
Certain death (I’m looking smug) for your men
and your worthless horses. Cleaning up, I found so many books about
dismemberment I barely knew where to begin.
I started from the beginning, with fountains of blood. I read them shooting out...
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I Read: "The Charles Mingus CAT-alog For Toilet...
Here’s a poem about how I live in Fishtown but not for much longer, among pests and vermin.
I sat around for a bunch of minutes thinking
whether or not to treat this little pamphlet as a book
until, imagining what Bruce Boone would do,
I said fuck it, Charles Mingus just taught me
how to make a cat accidentally learn
to flush a toilet, if this isn’t a book,
then what has my entire life...
Anonymous asked: you are my favorite tumblr writer. you may seriously be one of my favorite writers ever. who are you why do you write so well do you have books ahhhh well anyway keep it up because you're awesome
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I Read: "Vertigo," Charles Barr
Do you think this picture of Midge
as Carlotta Valdes is the weirdest part
of the entire movie? I do.
Enter one Starbucks, exit another,
I’m not sure how somebody got here,
dangling from a roof with fingers,
and transitions through editing to
material continuity, a body contiguous
with itself instead of parceled out
over the course of several hours. Did you think Kim Novac
looked like that...
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I Read: "Beast Book," Michael Gessner
What if I went to the Renaissance Faire
and came back stupid.
What if I said poetry was an open mouth,
while standing slack-jawed myself,
drooling on my frolicsome tabard,
chewin’ the cud, covered in pit-sweat? I know none of these poets are rich
so why do they keep going out to dinner
in their poems. What if I went on forever about
poached salmon and, uh, Triscuits and cabernet (??)
even though...
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I Read: "America Bewitched," Owen Davies
You came to my house and strok’d your beard
I was sick all the time you seeming friend and sly enemy
you jobbed me I will say
depart from me I KNOW you not
I will sell the judgement and pay the doctor bill
cast them until hell and
give them the dirty horse laugh being German
and stabbing one another on bridges
this being the general fabric of the local history
the bell don’t make please...
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I Read: "Your Name Is You," Edwin Fussell
1.
One white classics expert
playing at the beach.
He puts a little bone in his pail.
He’s throwing up immensely.
This is the second dude this year
I’ve heard compare a human vagina
to an anemone—the animal I think—
the polyp with stingers
how weird and if the flower
how weird also.
The Catholic Side of Henry James.
the anemone grappling his fat throat.
I didn’t like this book because the...
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I Read: "AWE," Dorothea Lasky
So you hate it when Dorothea Lasky sprays lasers in your eyes
but all of a sudden you love it when CAConrad sprays a mysterious elixir in your mouth?
You just love it when mosquitoes explode with your blood?
You just love spraying your blood into the quote-unquote “qlippoth” of a bug-body?
What? Maybe you’d like it better if you read it in a book?
Nothing about your thesis makes sense to me.
I’m...
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I Read: "Sorting Facts, Or Nineteen Ways of...
One time I got Chris Marker and Chris Burden confused.
Which one is crawling through broken glass to get at you.
I got Plutarch and Petrarch confused.
I ordered Pliny the Elder and they brought me Love Stout. One time I got teratoma and Charles Olson confused.
I made a mark and felt eschatologically Jewish,
in the fashion of my ancestors.
I felt an anagram constrict around a certain body.
I could...
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I Read: Mary Ruefle, "Selected Poems"
I get annoyed at the interest
poets show in things.
I passed by Skene Manor.
Who gives a shit.
It was built in the 1870’s
for $25,000, stone cutters
from Italy quarried gray
sandstone from Skene Mountain,
who fucking cares,
I went to taco bell and I spilled
hot sauce on Mary Ruefle’s name.
Let’s all take a nap.
Let’s stop and think about quietude.
I was ok being bored in a white...
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Four Lines For Jonny Lohr
Your poem about Metallica
is the poem I waited 26 years to write.
Thanks for pulling a Dick Whitman, pal,
on my entire wretched life.
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Hannibal (disambiguation)
On this week’s episode of Hannibal, Hart Crane
skins an eagle on his balcony.
He did it for its skin and heart.
He was supported by console brackets.
Hart Crane asks his lover, have you heard
of witch-balls before? and he’s laughing
obnoxiously. Dude.
In middle school, Hart Crane sat
at the back of the bus, singing
I did it all for the nookie, now,
in the future, TV detectives fishing
eagle teeth...
April 2013
9 posts
2 tags
Dear Jason Zuzga,
Thanks for these poems, Atom’s Lick, maybe
you remember us speaking for a second at a party,
I said I was looking forward to these poems, and now,
I have them, with the wait for better paper,
portraits of rocks, worth while for sure.
I got them from Jonny’s office, I got them
looking at an abandoned bookshelf
full of fantasy novels and he put a needle
through beeswax to assemble.
I liked the parts...
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That Evening I Felt Hungry and Weary and I Didn't...
Dock Street offers a luscious burger—
you heard it “dog street” and felt wary
about the meat, you got a vegetable calzone,
wrung a thin chemical slime through
some stranger-man’s limp pony-tail.
Offer a sip of beer, some limp-man’s stranger
pony-tail— not liking how that’s always someone
who ends up talking— Freak money winds up mumbling
in the pocket of a recognized public figure—
numerous...
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By the Fishtown Planet Fitness I Sat Down and Wept
Undeterred by debt and catastrophe,
I set off the Lunk Alarm by grunting and sobbing.
Is there any excuse for thinking about space
in terms of habitat and commute? Should I pick up
one leg and put it down somewhere else? Move
in fear along 52nd Street towards a haunted McDonalds?
Proceed all along by foot to cover sicker calves faster?
A siren in the middle of the night made me fall
from an...
johnnycrashbolding asked: I l0ve you. Is that okay?
4 tags
The New Issue of TINGE Is Out →
ghostorballoons:
TINGE, the Temple MFA’s online magazine, has a new issue out, and it’s great. Several of our poets this semester should be familiar to those involved in the Tumblr poetry discourse, and others should be familiar to Philly poetry people. And either way, there should also be a number of exciting surprises for you.
It’s been a pleasure working on TINGE for the past two years, and...
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Come Along and Be a Drag
Let’s destroy an old-growth forest
with powerful punches arbitrarily. You’re drunk. I hear you talking
to that load-bearing column. Architecture can’t reply to you. Get serious
real quick. Fall asleep in front of the employee exit. I want to be the youth-pastor telling you “Satan
is a fucked-up hater. He’s wack” while pushing my tongue down
your father’s ear-hole. I don’t have time for games. ...
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If you’re in the Philadelphia area, I’ll be reading at Tattooed Mom’s this Wednesday at 7:00, with two terrific Philly fiction writers and a couple of mysterious strangers from Rutgers. It’s the day after my thesis is due so I can guarantee the faint wreckage of a man. Come see me pronounce nouns while drooling.
March 2013
21 posts
2 tags
TERREUR SANS NOM
The French movie poster for The Blob
Features the subtitle
TERREUR SANS NOM
At the end
The blob may return from the ice
Because THE END
Blobs into a question mark
The blob is a database with theater inside,
The Colonial, in Phoenixville, PA,
Which I used to go to
Almost very day to watch
Almodovar movies or whatever
One time I went with a girl to see The Great Escape
This was the same day as the...
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Quick Question From the Back of the Audience For...
Weren’t you getting nailed
by brutal men
beneath the water-architecture—? —you phoneme, you
hieroglyph, you fast car shaped
like a friggin’ monad,
driven wild with bird-talkin’?
I Have No Notes In My Pocket →
A piece I wrote on Jen Bervin’s recent Duplessis Lecture in Poetry and Poetics is up at the Philadelphia Review of Books.
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Googling John Dowland at One AM, I Accidentally...
Several phrases taken from John Dowland. Except he didn’t really say “shitty bees”— he was not that kind of man in 1603. But it scans the same either way. Latin lines taken from Elizabeth Weston’s Parthenica. Not name-dropped but nevertheless important to this poem is Purcell— beneath whose sign the whole fucking thing is written, I suppose, attempting to adopt...
notimeforasecondlife said: Are you an English major? I’m still in high school, so the hardest piece of poetry I’ve come across is T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and our own. Lol
I majored in English as an undergraduate and I’m finishing up an MFA in poetry. Eliot can be pretty hard to get a handle on, I remember reading and rereading “The Wasteland” in...
notimeforasecondlife said: I’m having trouble understanding… what is this post about exactly? I see some atheist bashing… at least I think that’s what it is… I’m curious, I think this might be a great post if I understood the material Explain, please and thank you! :)
It’s a translation of a Friedrich Holderlin poem of the same title. You can go read it if you want. My version is...
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Some Rude Versions of Holderlin
Here are some Friedrich Holderlin translations, made rude by time, somewhat under the same sign as Anne Boyer’s terrific Goethe translations.
—-
DAS UNVERZEIHLICHE Ok fine—ditch all of your friends, heckle people at open mic night, whatever,
Creep around like a passive-aggressive weirdo making fun of ghosts and higher callings,
At least, like, God can forgive all that. But really now,...
funballs asked: how did you start your blog?
Thanks to everyone who submitted to TINGE! We received a flood of last-minute submissions, and we’re already faced with more publication-worthy poetry than we can actually publish. We’re definitely going to have to reject some totally outstanding pieces, so if you don’t get in this time, please submit again next semester! WE WANT YOUR POEMS.
Im at a point where whenever I’m able to stop generating writing, I can stop generating writing, which I need to do so I can go back and do revisions, formatting, bibliographical double-checking, putting in visual stuff, etc. But I can’t find a good stopping point, got too invested in weird fugue-structures, and circling around and around for fun.
Edit: Well, I posted this to the...
beigeslacks said: wow - this is really interesting - can I ask who you like to read?
My answer got swallowed up by Tumblr, so I’ll try again: for the purposes of this particular project, mostly Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, Jack Spicer, Bruce Boone, Dana Ward, Rob Halpern, Brandon Brown, Descartes, Roger Bacon, Andrew Jackson Davis and other Spiritualist lecturers, a variety of...
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Assorted Lineated Fragments From Thesis
Oh gee, everybody, this manuscript is a mess. Here are some bits and pieces from the last, long, densest part of it.
==
The blob is a database a creator dips his hands in,
Enacts a brutal mess,
Extracts wet data into animal form. I’d invent a robot and put a ghost inside,
As a source of sentimental labor,
Dress it up in my favorite kinds of clothing,
Like, a bow-tie, cuff-links,
Call it...
State of the Thesis
I found myself returning to the same set of referents, manically, almost helplessly, despite my decision to clear the field and resume from a fresh archive. A picture of Andrew Jackson Davis taped above my desk looked on with large, depressed-looking eyes, as if unable to understand why his use was deferred. If I am attempting to exorcise some thematic tendency, the exorcism is resisted. The...
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Crystallography 3
1.
When Jack Spicer really died his spirit gestated for nearly fifty years before re-emerging from the DX sea as a little baby ghost-egg in a crystal chrysalis, which was laid down by unknown hands at the gates of my monastery, which I push around in a pram all up and down Sansom Street as proud as can be. I reached into the aether and pulled out a parenting book which said, for ghosts, “Be...
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Crystallography 2
Anyway, refer back to my last poem about Jack Spicer for context.
—-
Craig Dworkin wrote about crystallography because he forgot what Clark Coolidge said, and made real the dream about the words Clark Coolidge said. I read the poem and increase in density, then I slide vertically along a fault line, and then I forget what I read and I vanish. So similarly in the new Jack Spicer the...
1 tag
WHAT DID I GET AT AWP
Maybe if you like my poems, you’re occasionally like, what poems should I read to be more like this guy. What cereals should I eat. How can I make my triceps more like his, softer, warmer, more gentle and yielding. Well, I was at AWP, and here are some tips on one of those things.
ghostorballoons:
A lot of stuff. But a bunch of it was free.
As Long As Trees Last, Hoa Nguyen (Wave Books)
...
yopoldtruths said: Nice piece!
Thanks, it’s from a section of my thesis that’s actually a total bummer, which is why I haven’t been posting anything from it, but re-reading this part tonight made me laugh, so I figured why not throw it on the ole’ internet at 1:00 AM.
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Crystallography 1
I woke up from a troubled dream that Jack Spicer didn’t die, and I sat in bed reading The Aldermen in Our Crystal Mansions: Collected Poems vol. 2 1965-2009 curling my lip at how bad they got, and the papers on my desk were held down by a papier-mache head of Jack Spicer, and Jack Spicer circled my hands with his hands as an astral projection, as a pseudo-shapeless construct of sheer...
LavosXII Chapbook Masterlist
lavosxii:
I reordered my dropbox recently. While this has made everything look nicer to me, it has also unfortunately killed several old links to my longer work. I’m making this master list to rectify that, and provide functioning links to longer things I made, am in, or had a part in making. This list will update as updates become available. The list can be found under the Chapbooks tag on my...
SUBMIT TO TINGE
comefriendlybomb:
TINGE Magazine, an online journal from Temple University, is seeking
submissions of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction until February 28.
TINGE is edited by the graduate students of Temple’s creative writing
program, and Issue Five will be published in April 2013.
Recent contributors have included Catherine Wagner, Christine Schutt,
Ron Rash, and Mat Johnson.
We do not have any...
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February 2013
15 posts
3 tags
from "Diverse Anthology of Mayhems": Transparency
1843: Andrew Jackson Davis passes rapidly into the high magnetic condition.
“Each human body was glowing with many colors, more or less brilliant. The figure of each individual was enveloped in a light atmosphere, which emanated from it. The same emanation extended up the arms, and over the entire body. The nails had one sphere of light surrounding them; the hair another; the ears another; and...
ghostorballoons:
Really excited to read with John Paetsch, whose talk at Blanket last year really blew open the doors in terms of reading Jack Spicer for me, at tomorrow night’s Principal Hand. If you’re in Philly, it’s at L’etage and starts at 8:00! It’s one of my favorite reading series in Philadelphia, and I’m super stoked to be part of it!
50,000 followers! Why??
Image: Einhard blogging at his haters.
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Und Raume, Raume, Raume Katzen: or, Second Sad Man...
Put empty beer on Wittgenstein’s head.
The beer has a picture of Walt Whitman on it. I’m what’s known as an “asaro head”—
which is a product you buy
to locate various values of planes,
with zero body attached,
a wild animal rooting out
an exterior surface of itself
with a leveling consistent
and regular in its horror— the human I loved has fled,
look,...
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Let's Try Anti-Depressants Poem, or
I became so mad at poetry
That I punched myself in the face
Repeatedly with a startling strength! I think as a moral imperative
We should probably kill ourselves
Tomorrow, or stop reading poetry, Or cut off our hands and mail them
To poets we don’t like, or loot a Dunkin’ Donuts
And pour all the donuts down a storm-drain. I recently was instructed to close my eyes
And pay mindful attention to...
Anonymous asked: do you want glory?
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