December 22, 2011 Mother was never prepared for Christmas. We would drive around in the old car on Christmas eve looking for a tree. Most of the tree lots would be empty or closed. But finally, beside some gas station, in the dark, a sign would loom, “TREES” and a light would be on. “There’s one! Stop! See? I see a tree…Mother, pull over!” one of my sisters would say. We would all run over to the last straggly tree, pay for it, stuff it in the backseat with me, and head home back to whatever apartment or house we were in that year. Mother would have done all her Christmas shopping earlier that day or maybe the day before, and would stay up all night wrapping and trimming the tree. She never remembered to buy Scotch tape or wrapping paper though, so our presents were often wrapped in newspaper [...]
Bianca Stone
What I love about Paul K. Tunis’s work is how brilliantly he melds traditional comic-book style with the experimental. “Toddlers & Tiaras & Vermin” uses three elements I find very interesting when creating a poetry comic: the poem itself, dialogue, and interpretive image (the latter as it differs slightly from the literal text of the poem). It works so well as a poetry comic because we see an absurd, strange elucidation of the poem through the images. However, Tunis never forces too much on the reader; there is always the sense that the images are only part of the story, and it creates a separate component. There’s mysteriousness in the image/text information given, allowing the reader space to create meaning on their own–what great poetry does. The poetry comic is straight forward, the arc, as seen through the images, eloquently executed, with the elements of the humorously (tragically) grotesque. Be [...]
The visual has always been an important means of communication, from caveman paintings, to graphic novels, to IKEA instruction manuals. We know it fits in somewhere with poetry, beginning with how poets and artists have always looked lovingly upon one another, and ending somewhere more uncharted. It’s been proposed that the use of illustration with poetry is redundant, but what this forum is interested in is not translating the words, but a much wider vision: illustration as a kind of poetic form. Poetry and poets who interact with the visual has limitless implications, from traditional use of the comic-strip and comic book, to a much more experimental use of text and image. I wish to go boldly, willingly, into Poetry Comics, and see what people are doing out there. I’m not entirely concerned with defining what I mean by Poetry Comics, but rather seeing how many tiny silver arrows we [...]
The second line of Ben Fama’s chapbook New Waves, (Minutes Books 2011), is “All I want is my life/ to matter somehow.” And it seems that this book sets out to execute that statement despite the line’s futility. I say this with sincerity since it’s an important aspect of the human condition (especially for writers) but remains an ungraspable, continuous pursuit. In short, this is a book composed with clear-minded longing. The cultural awareness is unpretentious, the feeling is real, and the structures are solid. There’s been a post about Ben Fama’s poetry brooding in me since his last chapbook, Aquarius Rising, came out from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2010, and that’s because his poetry sticks with me. The word “hipster” has been thrown around a bit in reviews, but I find the term superfluous and dismissing. The difference between Ben Fama’s poems and many of his so-called hipster contemporaries [...]
If Martha Stewart had a child who went rogue, moved to New York City, and started writing poetry and making books, that child may have turned out to produce something as crafty-bohemian as does. Their carefully assembled chapbooks are often made with hand-marbled paper, complete with twine, stitching, high resolution images, and tiny folded windows and flaps. Some images from the original archive are unavailable. The Dory Reader ($21 + $8 shipping / 12 print and audio issues) is a monthly periodical for subscribers, featuring a single established or emerging voice per issue. Each subscriber can feel special since each series is editioned according to the number of subscribers and is “intended to be read or listened to on a morning commute.” Subscribers receive a “kit” which consists of a letterpressed box (beautifully done) to store all the incoming pamphlets. Issue I, featuring the incredibly innovative artist-poet Jen Bervin, almost [...]
[Do you get any reception here?] Do you get any reception here? I think if you face West. You await silent sadness to filter in. Or if you shut it off you will be the same. Cracked open and with a scar. Light getting in through chinks at night. Bits of information like a glorious blanket over the sky. A window box of purple basil. A dried chili in a bowl of water. Blossoms exchanging news across the rooftops of the city. ____________________________________________ Matthew Rohrer teaches at NYU and is the author of A Plate of Chicken and Destroyer and Preserver (forthcoming), among other books of poetry.
Big Badness A dead CEO admonishes me to do what I love, which he can’t see me doing. I need only a clean place to lie around, to see a few decent things. You’re lucky if you have half of that, but which half. Also look up to see everything has gone a shade of purple which should only last a few minutes but goes on for an hour because of the clouds. And why is that, an equinox or its afterbirth staining everything some of the other words there are for purple. Go find them for me and keep maybe one for yourself, give them to me and invent more and I will acquire them, hand over the ones you were making and I will tell the world I invented them. They are mine (Lilac™, Violet™) and I will kill you to impress upon you that I can. ________________________________________ [...]
_______________________________________ M.A. Vizsolyi’s first book of poetry, The Lamp with Wings: Love Sonnets won The National Poetry Series, selected by Ilya Kaminsky, and is forthcoming in the fall 2011. He teaches ice hockey and ice skating lessons in Central Park, and lives in New York City with his wife, the poet, Margarita Delcheva. Related Posts “Via” by Amy Lawless Some David Schubert Poems You May Not Know Poem of the Week Doubleheader! Colie Hoffman & Maya Funaro How to Ransack a Poem for Parts Poem of the Week: Sharon Olds
Ode to the The I liked that you were small and thick, easy to recognize. I think I thought you were married to and, who was often somewhere in the sentence, holding things together, while you would be standing, a tin soldier, the rifle barrel of your h sticking up over your shoulder. I felt a little sorry for you, always announcing, never the thing itself. When I looked you up, they said your meaning is “controlled by the notion ‘previously recognized, noticed or encountered,’” and your Indo-European base is *-to-, and *-ta-, each of them the’d with its asterisk. O the, I have never thanked you, guardian of the noun, worker ant, moving things along as if from underneath–river of the, wheels of the. Thank you for always being yourself, never adding a letter to make a scary face from within the phrase. All honor to thee, enduring grammatical [...]
AN AGREEMENT REQUIRES AN OFFER AND ACCEPTANCE I came here to get you excited. We have an accidental stare-down. No bees, no money. No one says this. I am so frightening. No one is impressed. It’s all, a duck’s quack doesn’t echo and no one knows why. You think you are whispering when you are not. We are experts at distributing distorted information. This is how it might feel, take hold of something between your finger and your thumb and twist it sharply. Make a slight adjustment. A logical consequence appears to arrive, a bar, a partition, a stick. I am hitting rocks with a stick. What do you believe to be important points of convergence? Vegetables. Electricity. The extremely challenging sky. To show adoration with the eyes. To say something necessary. I avoid my eyes. I think I mean it. _____________________________________ Emily Pettit is the author of two chapbooks [...]
Recently I have begun the epic adventure of watching a series after its time on television. This means many hours of sitting in front of a screen, not having to watch commercials or wait a week, or a year, to see how it all unfolds. Often times when you should be writing the greatest poem you’ve ever written, you instead occasionally get sucked into some ghastly TV series with abysmal, trite acting from smarmy characters trying their best to act dramatic (and god-forbid actually funny), filling us with quiet horror. The symptoms after such excursions are as follows: A stunned sensation closely followed by confusion, acute anger, a longing to have everything you just wasted your time on erased from memory, and ending with a vow to write a letter to someone to make it stop. (One such show that fits perfectly into this category is Mental—the most offensive portrayal [...]
Some images from the original archive are unavailable.