October 2011
28 posts
3 tags
John Cleves Symmes
A small thing from a large thing that I’m tired of.
—-
was born with a stutter, a full-grown
musket through his chest like a thorn as a baby
(he grew around it he muzzled his flash
and had his mother tie his tie, press
the collar, fresh hat, flesh) and coughs around the introduction. Schoolkids of Ohio,
perk up and take notice! A great mouth yawning in the north,
water in, water out,...
September 2011
10 posts
4 tags
Oak Island MONEY PIT
I hate poets who are very rich and very bad.
I’m too boring to be awful and too poor to be rich.
A kind stranger tells me this and pats me on the head,
a friendly face in the wilderness. He’s a natural disaster. In any case: me and Catullus racing yachts to the black
hole at the ease of the earth and suddenly doing cocaine
in the vortex. He’ll ask about epistemology and I’ll make up
some answer...
thetargetbird asked: I'm really intrigued by the lexicon-based poems you made over the weekend (flattered that you chose me, as well). Is the collect that sparked the idea rooted in seeing those patterns of word-repetition? I think it's an interesting project -- one that could be carried into the primary composition of a piece. Some really interesting phrases come unexpectedly; I had to borrow some today...
3 tags
'That Feeble Strength,' Part 2
Mysterious lights hailing terrible kitchen fire. Grease on a trap. Smeared everywhere.
O! Hough
and hank and antler helix suspended in mid-air
a hook on the old French roof, to gold and drove you through
stereogrammar asked: your writing makes me full of wonder, therefore it is wonderful.
5 tags
Three Levels of Deformation after Jane Kenyon
I felt like trying some of the alternate methods I proposed on a famous poem by Jane Kenyon, one which I like very much, ‘February: Thinking of Flowers.’ You can see how the progressing levels of deformation shift the central locus of meaning in each successive piece.
—
[Original, aka control] Now wind torments the field,
turning the white surface back
on itself, back and back...
4 tags
'Blame It on Rain the': An exercise in ordering
This morning I got to thinking about repetition and structure and, inspired by Aaron Shurin’s excellent collection A’s Dream, the lexical reservoir each writer unconsciously digs for him or herself. I decided to try a goofy little exercise to condense a poem into the pure linguistic ‘stuff’ of itself.
Each of these poems is derived from a recent poem by a prominent Tumblr...
4 tags
'That Feeble Strength', Part 1
Something I initially wrote for a portfolio but already revised any interest I had in it away, so here you go Tumblr, here you go, here’s a poem in seven parts.
—
He said
‘Dead woman in the kitchen stories, yeah, I’ve got
a million— one second’ He said
‘In the absence of figuration, pure
thrashing around on the kitchen floor.
A terrible kitchen...
Anonymous asked: To answer YOUR question: If you can find it, see my essay "The Irruptive Text" in Poetics Journal Number 8, Elsewhere. Cheers, Aaron Shurin
