The Other

Maternalique Sure as a first balled fist, ____________________it wells you awake _______as from a quake– _____the want _______________to give a swaddled __________star to the night’s arc. You step out _____and the landscape lengthens. Each parcel of dark _______________a mouth to be fed, each umbra hunkered __________to its suckling. The fog rocks the gray, _____loving it [...]

No system can endure perfection. All systems thrive on defining imperfections either by way of “sin,” “error” being inappropriate, being “unprofessional” or being “counter–revolutionary.” Such offenses are punished or censored when it is an “I,” reformed when it is a “we,” and revamped or improved upon when in relation to an “it.” The one act [...]

LMB: You recently defended – for lack of a better word – the use of melodrama in poetics. Why do you think people are so uncomfortable with it? CF: It’s funny, because I don’t think melodrama itself is the problem; think, for example, of the melodramatics in Keats, in Eliot, in Donne – the first [...]

Doc, there was a hand Doc, there was a hand, my bed was pushed across the room, the wallpaper looked, I drew faces on the flowers, this one with closed eyes, and when I woke they suddenly opened. I watched my father wash his hands with gasoline, he always smelled of something burning. He held [...]

There is no Western tradition. What we call the western tradition is actually the Mediterranean merge tradition–a precarious marriage of eastern and western influences which became the so called “western” tradition by way of the scholastics and, later, the scholars of the enlightenment. So I will be calling western thought “warrior thought.” The truth is [...]

Great art and a true, living (not institutionalized) culture arise not from a series of snobs and gatekeepers, but from the inner necessity and desire of people to express the 7 kinds of affectual brain: play, courtship, grief, seeking, anger (outrage, scandal, impiety), caring (tenderness, friendship, affection, affinity), and fear. In terms of fear, grief, [...]

“Formal choices are never without ideological implications.” Marjorie Perloff From the title on of Jennifer Karmin’s “aaaaaaaaaaalice” (Flim Forum Press, 2010), we are falling—crowning though sentiment and buckshot language splayed across pages. “aaaaaaaaaaalice” is a book grappling to hold on to meaning in the self-fomenting chasm that is our condition. In this way, sentience is [...]