Thursday, May 22, 2008
 
"Watson and the Shark" and "Same Enemy Rainbow" by Erica Svec. Visual opinions whose surprise is there's no punch line. Svec's not trying to be funny, just sure. Contemporary to a no-fault. (Thanks to a post by Karen Weiser on Facebook that led me to Svec's gallery website.)
posted byJack 6:55 AM
First cousins twice removed, Frank O'Hara french-kissed Edwin Denby on multiple evenings but they had only one daughter, immaculately conceived! Her name is "Black Swallowtail," also the title of this poem.
Muddy, clinging electrons
why do jets linger over Easter
and eagle cloths
wink in twilight.
Smoking is hungry
green jacket is transition.
Out of my white binding braids
the blue cichlid and the orange cichlid
are brothers and Borough Hall
their ancestral home.
Return to repair damage the winter wrought
of salt on gums and warlocks on spit.
Charisma says one boy to the other
and boots of asskicking.
The earth evades our personal aviator.
Relays the itchy green fibers of April.
The transparent green
and blue Eastern Swallowtail
decorates a scarf all the way to Delancey Street
to the Village, to Queens.
-- Kim Lyons
posted byJack 5:49 AM
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Poem Stripped of Artifice
Mark Lamoureux
New School Chapbook Series 2008
If it is a trap, why are we going?
Here is the first section in Mark Lamoureux's chapbook-length poem.The telescope wobbles & collapses
On its 3rd leg, a landstrider felled.
A fissure mars the plate of its eye
& likewise the sky splits, another
fissure from which issues a mantis-
light. Get over it, my father says.
He is disappearing ahead of me, into
darkness. I remain in that spot:
lover's lane, clouds of breath, weak
little stars, unaided eyes. It's important to read above as centered, narrowly justified text, left and right, with double spaces between the lines, since the poem maintains this alignment in similarly 'fissured,' single columns through nine of its 11 sections. The poem is then punctured by and endures the blank of the paper it's printed on, adhering almost to the end to a marking time formation that implies a stationary position -- I remain in that spot -- but with steady knee and foot movement parallel to the ground, total control. The discipline will fall to pieces, as will Mark's specificity via poetic sleight -- landstrider, mantis-light. The discourse unravels around family members in a kind of process-conscious memoryscape: "I stole a / Legg's egg from my grandmother's / dresser ... How does it feel, my / wasting your time like this?" This from Section VI where there are a few more specifics, "I didn't / know there were pantyhose inside." But by Section XI the egg explodes as the columns give way to two-page-wide lines of prose, single-spaced. The sky seems truly split and the language heads for the South Pole.Feeling is considered to be subjective & intuitive, "warm."
The organ that produces sentience has been objectively identified as the brain. We find Mark in fairly airy, confessional, self-lecturing depression -- depression is his term, as are "heart death," anhedonia, Hell, and a few other place-holders that convey personal torment. The work concludes on a harrowing turn of events and idiom that may not be everyone's idea of a great time. It's not ironic. Not synthetic. It's upsetting. It's an antidote to Get over it.
posted byJack 9:30 AM
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Well, face it, I had given up on sincerity, and then --
Artificial sunlight lets us see the frailties in the packaging more clearly than we would have otherwise. As a white light, as a striking from a distance and alighting--COMMUNITY--I see all things when I only see you.
-- Sueyeun Juliette Lee
posted byJack 5:54 AM
Monday, May 19, 2008
Gluey pears, keelless refuser. Posing comes natural.
posted byJack 10:40 AM
What happened to your skin, Mr. Lin, it looks so radiant?
posted byJack 10:26 AM
Format interruption -- a good turn.
posted byJack 6:23 AM
This morning, filtered through the clock radio:
A Kremlin of lips. A Cyrillic vowel.
A Workers' harmony. A song might leak
out when silence is the acoustic remedy,
but how can we escape by foot an occupation of wings?
-- Anne Boyer
But I don't have a clock radio.
posted byJack 5:44 AM
Friday, May 16, 2008
Money grabber: Fruit-flavored Drāno.
posted byJack 7:08 AM
This means I can pay alimony in two states.
posted byJack 5:08 AM
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Chris Martin
American Music
Copper Canyon 2007
It is rare for a first book of poetry to make a bold play for the center, straddling the divide between conventional, unattenuated sense-making v. text-making sorted out of brainier experiment. Chris Martin's experiment is restrained, highly structured yet formally unobtrusive, much like composition for well-mannered chamber exercises, unrhymed tercets in short pieces of no more than two and a half pages, each poem winding down to a single-line coda. Programmatic, then, but light on its feet, American Music carries out its smart, dexterous research by means of what Chris or perhaps his persona suggests is plagiarism, finding support from scores of sources named in poems and at the back of the book. "I drove 4,000 miles to realize all / My ideas were still in Ohio." I don't believe him, anymore than I believe the pieces are "jokes." Thanking others for ideas, borrowing a noun or two, keeping the form transparent, calling the result a trifle, in this regard, Chris sets the bar low, rightly, for artifice to mushroom. Better to take on an immense range of here and now, including daring parts like sentiment and tepidity. Who but someone with a big flat-panel brain can lead us out of the trope "The crisp blue winter sky" into an alarming meta-video:And you assimilate it, allow it
To manufacture in the peripheral
Coloring that inquires
Eye to work to ear -- bluebird, bluebell
Bellbottom, and so
On, unraveling, a sea of cyborgs
Proliferating endlessly only
To end up jump
Cutting as one man lusts... That's a lot of blue, a color and a feeling he plays like an instrument -- "…hernia / Throbbing, my dream // Of an ex-girlfriend pixilated / Into the synaptic void..." -- to deal in the obvious and back up the almost ordinary -- "There's even a girl in the window / Teaching herself sign language / And laughing unself-consciously..." This is almost ordinary in that saying things this plain this concretely is unnervingly apolitical, nonminimalist, and promethean: "you / Being I, here, the uncalloused / Observer of daily, nay // Momently phenomena..." Chris holds out his hand which is uncalloused as well, but shaking, holding it "Out to the various people I am / Thinking to love." American Music maneuvers away thus from prevailing urban poetics, a one-volume victory streak.
posted byJack 7:40 AM
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
posted byJack 6:37 AM
Saturday, May 10, 2008
The John Ashbery in Facebook is a Dartmouth alum and has no friends. This seems unfair. (He bears a striking resemblance to ...)
posted byJack 9:49 AM
Friday, May 09, 2008
There's a single young male who sends me all my spam. His voice is unified squeaky. The vocabulary under his command is familiar. Often he conveys a sense of urgency. This seems superfluous. It puts me off. I like to hold my promiscuity close. Won't spend money on a teen stranger, even if the item or his service is on sale. Won't click through to his website as he requests. I don't like the prospect of disappointment. Or misconstruing my own motives. I'll stick to the background, keep a distance. Given my frequent refusals, the guy keeps coming back trying to break down my defenses. No way, how ribald, I think I'm Fellini.
posted byJack 6:54 AM
Thursday, May 08, 2008
No joke. I sneezed just before I read --
I have not stopped
Sneezing, though I did pause
In writing this poem
To hunt down a fearsome
Silverfish, which undulatingly flew
Across the keys ...
-- Chris Martin
posted byJack 7:44 AM
Hold on, I'm going to put you on "dialog enhancer mode."
posted byJack 6:25 AM
They bear shame but who are they?
posted byJack 6:02 AM
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