My wives had a fear of falling. Decreed: return kids to their polygamous campground.

Nobody has shown that a poem is comparable to a nuclear weapon.

Today's daft moral takes place within a jewel colored perfectible. I would strike the legend mirror-like fragment shimmer dissembling. Keep the title, "The Milk Rally."

Burbling across the Atlantic, abundant, compulsive bricolage, redemptive and busy with slivers of disruption, the rousing start of "Beauty."

It's the new absurdity, supervisory unatone in urbane color as black iterary
seepage, Via Addolorata soldered to the sell. Something like ground
pianos of afar buzzing stars your itinerant field
remarks with uncounted annotations in the rain remembrance. You knew when
you felt as buses arrive: with every death of a pope. That part of poverty. Every death

in asterisks...

-- Jennifer Scappettone

Referencing my last post, below, I hear from Karen Weiser that the title of Erica Svec's show, "Same Enemy Rainbow" (also the title of the painting on the right), comes from a poem by John Coletti. Good to know!

   

"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.)

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

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.

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

Gluey pears, keelless refuser. Posing comes natural.

What happened to your skin, Mr. Lin, it looks so radiant?

Format interruption -- a good turn.

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.

Money grabber: Fruit-flavored Drāno.

This means I can pay alimony in two states.

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.

The John Ashbery in Facebook is a Dartmouth alum and has no friends. This seems unfair. (He bears a striking resemblance to ...)

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.

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

Hold on, I'm going to put you on "dialog enhancer mode."

They bear shame but who are they?

Ways women around Marie Antoinette were modern: Oh, so many. They were early risers. They dressed not merely for success, survival. They avoided work that was intellectually focused. They peered back and soaked up the landscape. They were gossips, bless them.

Robert Downey, Jr. showed up Sunday at Boston Garden for the seventh game in the Celtics-Hawks far from predictable playoffs. He's still got this dreamy but only partially puffed-up face and big, dopey, sweltering eyes flashing fiery darts that tell you how often and how profoundly he's been distracted just getting through the last forty-eight hours to make it here. This far.

We talked over our Stoli Vanil minutes after the game, which the Celtics won, thanks. He was in Boston to catch the last of the series, and it's surely coincidental that his megahit Iron Man debuted nationally this weekend as well. He's been in Waimea Canyon on Kauai for months filming with Jack Black and Ben Stiller (who was to join us after the game, but something came up). Iron Man is very old news for Downey. Production was last year. When you watch him soar through the stratosphere again and again in Iron Man you get that impression in spades. "Am I Tony? I'm not Tony. I've got to be Tony again!" he blurted after only a sniff of his drink, which otherwise he did not touch. I didn't drink, either, absorbed as I was in his old "moment" as Tony. That's Tony Slate, the Iron Man. Downey's held up remarkably since I knew him back at Presidio Hill School on the west coast. His publicized bouts of inebriation, let's call it, and perp walks to rehab notwithstanding, he's entering a new, next phase. "I'm not a kid anymore externally," he admitted, as if this were a segment in an ongoing campaign to get himself cacooned inside a safe, no-death place. Had I the thread bundles and draglines, I'd have kept him here.

It's hard to salvage U.S. expressionism bent on domesticating homespun technology run amuck. All the rampage of Iron Man is contained in field explosives, a Malibu cliff housing the cooler of two labs, a block or two of Afghanistan rebuilt within LA city limits, parched hills we've seen before. Tony's other lab, a cave in fake Afghanistan, and all the glowy alchemy shining on his genius cheekbones are traceable to as far back as Bride of Frankenstein. Come to think of it, Tony's pout, tilt of head, and sulky profile conjure Elsa Lanchester's dual outlines of Mary Shelley and the Bride. While Tony's rasp dredges up Noel Coward, the after party. That far.

Iron Man's story is demagnetized, clad in desolate sarcasms just like Tony. The problem with armed robots turns into a familiar intra-corporate battle of wits, in which the good and the bad have half a point. The U.S. military stands on hold until lawyers and the press show up. The U.S. government is reforming itself somewhere in Arizona, maybe. Not messing with Gwyneth Paltrow, Downey's action requires we imbibe and merge with his pure, open, and larger character outside his merely bringing animation-to-life, that is, his art and his body, his figure and his celebrity, our viewing and his performance. In contrast, when he twists the head off Jeff Bridges, Downey gives us a synthetic notoriety of chintz and winsomeness stomping and cavorting giantlike across our own timidity. Moral? Even his neck muscles have learned to shrug. You see a great veteran starting to combust.

Money grabber: A video collection with every Harvey Keitel film. "You could have a gun, you could be going to get a gun, or you could just be, in essence, fronting." Call it Harvey Fully Loaded.

How did I miss a million of these? They're totally untrite, compelling.

Money grabber: Bespoke medical smocks with discreet baseball insignias hand-stitched on the left lapel. Sold exclusively at places where med students shop. In Boston, the insignia would be the red B -- available at the Harvard Medical Coop and Brooks Brothers.