Category: Poetry and Poetics

Slip settle into found bona fides, interpretive transverse plays meeting to embrace still pretenders filling an interval – locus classicus – refurbished injury staying, a stitch in the margin, a nerve- how seen, diverse as a planet if one can re-member, one shiny token, a sparkle in the eye between thoughts, expeditious, angular de- natured curve- cupping slippage, circumference to radius point being, to or not to come to a complete stop ___________________________________________________ Christopher Stackhouse is the author of Slip (Corollary Press, 2005); and is co-author of image/text collaboration with writer/translator John Keene, Seismosis (1913 press, 2006), which features Stackhouse’s drawings in philosophical discourse with Keene’s texts. His poems have been published in several literary journals including EOAGH, Octopus, GlitterPony, Aufgabe, Hambone, nocturnes (re)view of literary arts, and The Recluse. He has a book of poems forthcoming from Counterpath Press (Denver, CO), and a collection of various texts on art, [...]

Michael Montlack’s new poem collection Cool Limbo, for starters, looks really cool before it’s even opened. The collection establishes a definite and intentional first impression: with its sassy cover illustrating a bygone scene (addressed in the title poem): a certain sort of girl, luxuriating in her aloofness, sunning on a deck chair near some backyard pool–face wrapped up in her shades, brow kissed by big hair, lost in her radio songs, Marlboro dangling between painted nails; in the water a curious little boy floats in the pool, buoyed by giant inflated wings, gazing at this girl in his semi-lassitude with what might be the kind of fear, envy, and worship a kid can have for an older sister. Cool Limbo traces the emotional development of an awkward boy, adrift in a suburban childhood, into a gay man and a poet who, perhaps, now bobs reflective in the deep end of [...]

Candor Here, Lustre There In memory of Paul Violi To keep my friends is my delight so in this book I pray you’ll write quoth Miss Aurelia to her twins you who are younger than them remember the wealthy all leaving for a living our feathers! I’ve moulted only Liberace— insincere shadow not lacking boring parts but oh the many tiny weathers never played on a priceless piano thoughts which follow cigs lose places in another wobbly line messy breath toute l’âme resumée may you sit on the tack of knowledge and rise to the chair of success Several loudly splayed from a hard spin with something too pink to stay in glass preferable chair of your perpendicular dance isn’t now this evening’s entertainment you mean the Habanera what was that maiden collapsed! and when she fell you called me lady beefsteak when you’re hungry champagne when you’re dry money [...]

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 [...]

First things, first. Full disclosure: Tom Sleigh was my teacher and thesis advisor at Hunter College. Fuller disclosure: my admiration for Tom’s poetry outweighs any personal loyalty to Tom (though I have that too). * * * Tom Sleigh’s method is art, but his end is anthropological. His vision is fully humane, an attempt to catalogue people, events, and his own place among them. Because of this, one might be surprised that this collection begins with a three part series of poems that picture a lively army scene populated by anthropomorphized cats. In this opening poem, readers find the sheer pleasure of reading Sleigh’s poetry. His idiom is musical, yet speechly: Over by the cemetery next to the CP you could see them in wild catmint going crazy: I watched them roll and wriggle, paw it, lick it, chew it, leap about, pink tongues stuck out, drooling. Cats in the [...]

After Catullus and Horace only the manners of centuries ago can teach me how to address you my lover as who you are O Sestius, how could you put up with my children thinking all the while you were bearing me as in your mirror it doesn’t matter anymore if spring wreaks its fiery or lamblike dawn on my new-found asceticism, some joke I wouldn’t sleep with you or any man if you paid me and most of you poets don’t have the cash anyway so please rejoin your fraternal books forever while you miss in your securest sleep Ms. Rosy-fingered dawn who might’ve been induced to digitalize a part of you were it not for your self-induced revenge of undoneness it’s good to live without a refrigerator! why bother to chill the handiwork of Ceres and of Demeter? and of the lonesome Sappho. let’s have it warm for now. [...]

VII Beneath the black jungle palms, monkeys. They remind me of me, my tools, my cartoon heart that’s shaped like a heart. Other better animals are pronounced as being heavenly, in this native island tongue. I’m not true and I’m not free, I know I should go somewhere official, somewhere right, like make my way back to the mainland, get home from my violet days of taming parrots and sunburn. If I could slather on my own tame desires instead of the monkey’s touch while I sleep, I would not want but still I would burn and for next to nothing. Some coconut milk, a better name, this is no way to get back home. There’s time. Turn black. IX Saying the word sonar is satisfying. During the Cuban Crisis, we smoked sugarcane and they dropped depth charges by our family home. I watched one soldier walk into the river [...]

This entry is part of a series, Poetry and Loss» , Poetry and Loss» , Poetry and Loss» The poet who saved my life never existed for me in his native language. He died fifteen years before I was born. His name is Miguel Hernandez, and he will never be as well known in English as Lorca, Jimenez, or Machado, but he is my poet, the one I would take with me into exile. When I first met one of his poems I was a senior in high school and my mother had just died. She did not die prettily. I remember the good Catholic liberals in my school showed a film on how a good Catholic family should behave during a terminal illness. I sat in the class growing more and more enraged. I shouted at the teacher: “There’s no right way to behave fuck face,” and stormed out [...]

Extract from My Ragged Company, #19 I asked Alice to ask me to marry her. She asked if I wanted to lick the painting on the hotel wall. That’s a poster, I said. Just a paper Hopper: a sad woman in a red teddy sat on a hotel bed reading a yellow letter: He’s not coming back. I asked for a kiss. She asked for a testament. Outside, I asked a man to point me to a lake or a liquor store. In Michigan, the man said, a liquids most obvious attribute is repression. But, he said, all taverns in Michigan share one trait: inside is someone that will make you feel at home. I followed his pointer. I walked across the street. I took the ferry. I climbed a hill and a tree and sat in a deer blind for a week until two hunters found me and took [...]

Bloodwork Some guy, bleeding, just beaten by hooded strangers on the late train, asks some girl, Miss S, a witness, the same question that lovers ask each other turning from mirrors, away, “How do I look?” & she, bystanding, replies “Frankly, you’re in a bad way.” She’d been thinking of the one, long gone, who got away, the one who’d taken himself from her & those days when she’d turn, adoring, to him. Amazing. (That’s what he used to say.) Thus S, on loss, ruminates. You can see what she’s getting at, can see where she’s heading. Your eyes have got that same telling ache & sanguine reverie. You too have once walked in twos, linked to another in the light rain…. But we all, now & then, walk alone, especially in the city of men, where most you meet are bled dry & broken, or have cashed in care [...]

A selection from Upriver It was a struggle switching over to a citrus flavored toothpaste, but Roosevelt loved her. The more nights he spent at Linda’s place, the less sense it made to keep brushing with just water. She never offered outright, but he used her toothbrush that already tasted mostly like oranges anyway. “We are not a regular couple,” she would say. “We have a structure.” This was true. They followed a very precise schedule. But Roosevelt’s nose was sensitive. He thought about toothpaste when they kissed at night and he should’ve been thinking about her. _____________________________________________________________ Sara Slaughter lives in New Orleans and is currently enrolled in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Honeyland Review, Method, and a collection celebrating what would have been the 100th birthday of Elizabeth Bishop. Related Posts Poem(s) of the Week: M.A. Vizsolyi [...]

Dead reckoning Late in the day and the sky is still white. When I look across the river I see another city. Even the sun is still so white. Yesterday I went walking with my hands in front of me and my lungs inside me I know I did. See, nothing has changed between us and the selves that arrived here. Sometimes the moon still appears, after a struggle. Other times it is obscured, is absent. The moon, beyond which are stars. People following them from another latitude. Yesterday I went walking and in front of me were hands. _______________________________________ Adam Tessier lives in Cambridge, where he manages a coffee shop. He has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Memorious, Linebreak, Remedy Quarterly, Anti-, and elsewhere. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Joseph Fasano The Melody Ascends Stepwise February 15, 2010 [...]

Just before puberty struck with the force of the furies and made me a moody kid, prone to sudden bouts of gloom and equally sudden bouts of elation, it was discovered that I had a gift for music. The mode of discovery was a cheap 20 dollar Magnus chord organ purchased for my sister at the now defunct “Two Guys” supermarket. Two Guys wasn’t exactly a supermarket, but, rather a combination of a supermarket, clothing, and toy store–with a little bowling and pin ball area for the kids to keep them busy, and way ahead of its time (Sort of a proto-Trader Joe’s/Wegman’s). It went out of business sometime in the late 70s, I believe, but, at the time, it was known as a place with good cuts of meat and an area to keep the kids occupied while the parents shopped. Anyway, my parents purchased the organ for my [...]

This is how I usually go to Kramerbooks. I arrive in Dupont Circle in the pre-dinner hour, emerging from the Q Street exit of the Metro and heading shortly down Connecticut Avenue and through the glass door by the shop window. Immediately you are inundated with wood shelves and stacks of all the books you’ve been reading about in magazines and online in recent weeks. Moreover, the smell of the place – coffee and pastries mostly, but pervasive and richer; it seems to have seeped into the pages – is most inviting. I browse the stacks of new releases, reading first pages and blurbs, getting a sense of what the reviewers have been talking about. The large wall to the left of the entrance comprises the fiction section, while smaller, chest-sized shelves in the foreground display titles in philosophy, religion and spirituality. In the back, facing the entrance, are travel [...]

I think of all the human emotions that call for the gravitas of form, loss, grief, and outrage need it most. In the case of Paul Celan, the complete break down of syntax and logical priority in his poetry was, chiefly, a formal necessity rooted in the murder of his people. He was writing in the language of the murderer, and, like the conquered Irish, and the enslaved African, this formal necessity compelled him toward re-inventing German, “mangling” it as it were, in order to achieve a true poetics of witness. What cannot be born must ever more carefully be shaped. The handling of such overwhelming material is first and last, a question of form. Grief, loss, outrage, must be made portable. They must have their ceremony: embodiment, purgation, and, if possible, catharsis, and it is important to instill in a young poet the sense that precision, finding the right [...]