August 2012
20 posts
Anonymous asked: Besides liking your work, I also like that you like Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Do you also like to open things?
2 tags
The Second To Last Days of Descartes
Young Descartes with strips of lead expanded the space
between speech and speech. His stomach weak
from savories revolted, writhed out of its door
onto ten million phantom cleaning ladies swooning
in the zone of Descarte’s sleep.
He conceived of methods of delivering force
from one location to another.
The event summed up as tons of bricks and stuff
exploding and a bunch of guys irreparably...
Please tell me if that fucking sucks and makes you vomit because I need something to hand in.
2 tags
The Last Days of Descartes
Descartes loved cross-eyed women.
The statue of his God smeared
silver liquid from its thigh. He or it responding to stimulus
(electric) flinched, shed in
increments extra weight, or phenomenon. I am smitten no longer.
He is no longer Descartes.
The statue of his God is no longer
several units of marble balanced on a dias. No longer touching a coordinate at
multiple points and no longer his...
3 tags
The Arrival of Descartes to Cole Phelps'...
Also from ‘The Air Loom Gang’
Cole Phelps, the leader of the community, had divided Southeastern Pennsylvania into small cube-shaped portions and transported them one by one across the country, through the canyons and across dangerous rivers, to California where he re-organized them into more pleasing arrangements, here planing off an unruly set of hills, there elaborating the...
3 tags
other from 'Albertus Magnus'
Jack Spicer and Vejovis stood
with their feet cocked on stony outcrops
observing the Pacific Ocean crack the coasts
severally and shoot up the channels
to multiply forever. some wretched alchemy will make this society gleam
they thought
in their private costumes
smoking cigarillos
polishing bars of soap with their enormous rings seen with the face suspended two inches
from the surface of the...
A Couple Statements About Poetics
1) First of all, I don’t really like statements about poetics because they make me feel like middle-management in some obscure mode of production— second of all because I feel that poetry in particular demands that the writer remain in the dark to a certain extent— which is perhaps a little too “practice of outside”-ish to remain practical. That being said, there are...
3 tags
from "The Air Loom Gang"
I barely even know what these poems are for but this is page like— 90, or 95 or something?
——
I was profoundly skilled in Pneumatic Chemistry. As a Catholic and a Hegelian I strolled the town swinging
a crazy metal ball with spikes on a thing with a chain. I swung my weapon with nervous bravado.
I made my teeth hum commands to the line of trees. I made my tongue sing like...
3 tags
also from "Albertus Magnus"
bdreid-writing asked: Looking at your latest "Albertus Magnus" piece, you've almost got yourself a random-chance structure. (It's 8x4, but at an extremely quick first glance, I almost thought it was 6x6, which would fit for dice.) Although it's not, that does tangentially make me wonder if you've ever had any luck (pun intended or not - your call) with poetry not written, but read through...
3 tags
Poem of the Week: Elizabeth Cantwell | the the... →
thetargetbird:
ecantwell:
I have a soft spot in my heart for this poem because it has been through one workshop and many revisions and many rejections. And now it is resting happily over at The The! Everybody wins.
Good stuff here, guys!
I missed this during my semi-continued internet hiatus but I always check what thetargetbird has been posting and reblogging to when I’ve been gone...
wafflebox asked: Hello, I was wondering, and sorry if you've noted this somewhere, but do you have any works published for sale?
hookedonsemiotics:
Futurism is more interesting than Surrealism because Breton never blew up the moon, he just said it was a flower and treated women like shit. I mean what if someone wrote a Futurist version of Nadja, can you imagine how much better that would be!
It’s called the Pisan Cantos.
3 tags
Two Short Poems About the Lyric "I"
Here are some poems I wrote when I thought fondly of David W. Pritchard during lunch. Apologies to Jon Schoenfelder for playing fast and loose with how Fallout: New Vegas works.
1. The Lyric “I” Hates Sleeping Alone But I Hate the Lyric “I” so I shut it down
despite my freezing to death in an unknown tundra
and the lyric “I”’s luxurious parka
and the thick historical pelt of the thing
and the...
2 tags
Poems Delivered by Fed-Ex on Trash Pick-Up Day...
Tell me more-
my toe-nail came loose
I read a poem about water
becoming disgusting by conditions
and Japanese workers looked at
with language derived from news-sources. and the pages smelled kind of good.
The pages smelled like popsicle sticks.
Go on.
A very large horsefly poured a beer bottle onto the poem.
I read a poem about beer
a very large house-show rubbed beer into the carpets...
3 tags
Also A Book Of Marvels of the World
there’s thunder in the city and Jon and Skip have gone
and a roll of toilet paper has almost fallen in the bowl. And Abby ordered a hard-drive to help contain data.
Kathleen Fraser wrote “Things sift through” in all caps
in the middle of a poem of vacancies.
Let’s try to understand that.
Sarah Rosenthal brings it up in an interview. Let’s stand in front of a bathtub and say “things sift...
4 tags
By Huntingdon Station I Snuck Down and Crept
This is an excerpt from around page 80 or so of this long thing, tentatively called “The Great Refusal: or: Doctor Universalis Fights the Lights.” It is partially a friendly homage to Elizabeth Smart and partially a little bit about the German poet Durs Grunbein.
—
Room temperature is room temperature. Room temperature is a fluid medium you can pass through as a body. It is an...
The wheat goes unharvested/ the spears broken
This blog has laid dormant for long stretches of time this summer, which I feel weird about. I’d like to sheepishly apologize to anyone who has been waiting for an update these past few weeks, or who has begun following me in this banal interregnum.
The situation is, basically, that I’ve been working on a very long serial poem, which has fluctuated from 200 pages to its current,...
5 tags
Paul Celan's Emily Dickinson
Did you know that Paul Celan did a lot of really cool translations from English? Get a load of this crazy Dickinson.
The original:
I reason, we could die—
The best Vitality
Cannot excel decay,
But, what of that?
Celan’s German:
Ich denk: Sieh zu, man stirbt,
der Saft, der in dir wirkt,
auch ihm gilt dies: Verdirb—
ja und?
My re-translation:
Just think: you see,...
