June 2011
22 posts
somethingnotclever asked: Hey man whats your inspiration? Cause your writting is amazing man!
Notes to 'Part 18'
Well, I think this is the end of my Socrates/Nixon poems. I had sort of hoped they would sort of grow thematically closer and that by the end of the sequence they’d be friends of a sort, but nope. I guess I can call it a failed experiment. Fun to write, hopefully fun to read, but now really what I set out to write (although in any case I do feel like I’ve come out of it understanding...
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Part 18. To Refrain From Kissing the Young and...
“‘Dear me,’ said Socrates. ‘So that’s why I had a sore arm for more than five days, as if some wild beast had bitten me, and left a sort of ache in my heart!’”
-Xenophon, Symposium Lycon toes the tow-rope
Of his joy boat. His toy hope,
His cork-made hover and float,
His figurehead bobbing half-painted
In the moat. (There wasn’t a moat) At the bottom of...
exempli-gratia-deactivated20120 asked: Ha ha ha, but seriously. Your poems are lovely and sometimes I wish I could grab a beer or a sandwich with you and pick your brain and talk about classics and poetry and all this shit. Forgive me, I'm Valium-ed.
exempli-gratia-deactivated20120 asked: I am devastated because you wrote about the "little bears" before me, though it serves me right for making outlines for poems and never writing them.
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Part 17. Little Bears
Little Bears, arktoi, they were called. Dedicated to the virgin huntress goddess Artemis, they wore animal skins and headdresses, and on occasion saffron-yellow dresses. Vase fragments from the site show naked maidens running away from pursuing bears- a rite the girls themselves possibly endured with real wild beasts.
-‘The Hemlock Cup,’ Bettany Hughes
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The girl in the Kelly...
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Part 16. I Can't Ever Say That, But I Believe It
Caesar in the bath turns the tap with his foot, says
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Antigone. Not
Particularly important stuff, don’t get me wrong,
But thinking about it nonetheless. Pericles runs a hand over his giant ugly onion-shaped head
In front of the mirror. He thinks he’s getting fat as hell.
He thinks his dick is a tiny, hilarious joke. My helmet
Won’t even go on over my goddamn...
Notes to "Landscape With a Man Pursued By a Snake"
-This was inspired by the titular painting, which currently hangs in the Musee de Beaux-Arts in Montreal. You might be familiar with its more famous cousin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, which is about ten years older, also by Poussin.
-The lack of stanza breaks and general approach to linebreaks and syntax loosely inspired by Dean Young, whose recent Fall Higher (2011) I recently read....
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Landscape With a Man Pursued by a Snake
-Landscape with a Man Pursued by a Snake, Nicolas Poussin (1638)
i. The man is the same as any other man, suppose. He could have
A kindness in him. We’d like to assume friendliness. We don’t
Go in for that jeder fur sich und Gott gegen alle horse-shit,
We tell each other at bus-stops and at the New Haven station
When the heavy engines are wheeled into place and the dim
Blue light of the dining...
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O Burlington, Up Yours
What is it about vacation that makes a man
Turn glutton? Look, just look how I keep leaning over
And eating these onion rings off the president’s table.
Look how I keep gnawing my own fingers off at the joint,
And coughing them back up on the pile of aperitifs. A cloud full of bad Led Zeppelin covers falls heavy over the water.
A homeless dude begins to do magic tricks. He dons the wooden
Rabbit...
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15. New and Selected Prank Phone Calls of...
I’m sure this is going to format like ass but let’s give it a shot. P.S. The second last bit is one of several references to Fritz Lang’s “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse’ in this series of poems. However, I feel like this one is a bit too obtuse and vague so I thought I’d point it out explicitly.
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Do you have any Tricky Dick in a can?
...
sexuallysinister asked: Hey I'm an aspiring poet, do you have any tips on writing at all?
fernandofrench asked: We're doing a group read! (Or rather, trying to do one.) The list of book nominations is pretty lengthy and needs to be further reduced. And because you wield literary influence on Tumblr, I was hoping you could review it and send me your top 5 choices.
Here is the long list: http://fernandofrench.com/post/6232204419/the-long-list
And the original post:...
Here is the long list: http://fernandofrench.com/post/6232204419/the-long-list
And the original post:...
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12. Richard Nixon At the End of His Life Refutes...
I forgot to do a part 12. Well uhh.
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It was the summer of 1993 that inanimate things came to life, two years
Before Toy Story and the last full summer of his life. From his balcony
In Vermont Nixon stood and saw the empty beer bottles of the neighbor’s
Lawn stir to life and bury their faces in shame. He saw gulls wheel back
In horror from the snapping coast, the armed juntas of salt. He...
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Landscape with the Meal Of
Cooking never looks fun until
Someone else does it. Then you want to do it
Every day. Your girlfriend humming the overture
From Nabucco while zesting lemons, cutting up a leek. From the window, in accordance with prophecies, whitecaps on the lake.
She says: the wind is really picking up, we don’t even need
To have the fan on. So the fan goes off and you can smell
A little better the undersmell of...
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Part 14. Diotima, Yet Unfound
I went on a little vacation, and then I spent some hours lying on the ground in agony. I hope you guys didn’t forget about poem. I hope you aren’t all sitting there like ‘what the heck is this. Poem??’
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Blest on all-night public access television
Blest by the holy ghosts of indigestion, dissolving in a glass of water
Blest by the speechful women on the roadside,...
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May 2011
16 posts
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Part 13, Impartial Third Party Adjudicator on...
I accidentally typed ‘chiton’ instead of ‘Chiron’ and was like, hey, I’m into this! I’m into this horrible mistake!
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Note down note down shift in temperature/humidity on
Respective coasts of Athens and Manhattan. The lightning
Whelk spooning inwards, proceeding from the left. They both coughed and coughed until their bodies
Caved in. The plastic cups...
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Part 11: Laches Surveys the Two-Weeks Dead at...
I haven’t written a sonnet in years, when I was held at gunpoint by a shadowy cabal of undergraduate professors and forced to use forms. Since then, the only sort of formal poetry I’ve voluntarily kept up doing has been sestina, which I’m awful at but which still holds some kind of compelling numinous mystery for me.
Anyway, this is about the siege in the aftermath of the...
