On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, [...]
On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, [...]
Bestiary
TLTR: The Importance of Short Literature in the Age of TMI The phrase “Too Long To Read” is apparently Too Long To Say—TLTR is an acronym for articles, essays, and whatever else we scroll past on our phones. Whether you use this (increasingly common) phrase or wish it were a “LOTR” typo, the fact remains: things are getting shorter. Texts, articles, attention spans—and as the distance between two points virtually shrinks, constant innovations allow us to communicate more with less. Condensed meaning, one of poetry’s proudest features, has taken on new forms more rapidly than ever before. Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms, edited by Alan Ziegler, reminds us that this work was happening long before ‘lol’—and extending far beyond the realm of the poem. Some people read horoscopes daily. Others, a Bible verse. Fortune cookies, proverbs, [...]
On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, [...]
This portable altar to Vodou lwa Erzuli (also sometimes spelled Ezili or Erzulie) Freda was hand-crafted by Mambo (Priestess) Julie, as an adaptation of a traditional Vodou altar. In the religion of Haitian Vodou, altars are frequently dedicated to specific lwa (analogous to Catholic saints, these are venerated spirits that serve as intermediaries between God and mortals). Each lwa has specific traditional offerings that correspond to his or her tastes and respective backstory. Erzuli Freda is the lwa most commonly associated with love, beauty, romance, femininity, wealth, and the finer things in life; her altars are frequently decorated with the colors white and pink. She favors offerings such as champagne, lace, and certain perfumes, and her altars frequently reflect this as well. Many initiates will also tell you that Erzulie Freda has a certain type of purity that combines the virginal with the idealistic. Although she craves and appreciates tasteful [...]
On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which questioned whether American poets still produce political work, and suggested that “literary [political] provocation in America is . . . at a low.” Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, [...]
On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which suggested that American poets no longer write political work. Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their [...]
On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which suggested that American poets no longer write political work. Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their [...]
On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which suggested that American poets no longer write political work. Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their [...]
Sinéad Morrissey’s most recent collection of poems, Parallax, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry in late 2013, opens by defining its title via the Oxford English Dictionary as, “the angular amount of … displacement or difference of position, being the angle contained between the two straight lines drawn to the object from the two different points of view, and constituting a measure of the distance of the object.” Morrissey’s citation of this precise definition implies the role of subjectivity in poetry — not only determining the distance and perspective of the subject to the object studied in poetry, but also how determining that perspective contributes to the holistic meaning of a poem.
Morrissey views her subject matter from many angles, allowing her poems to express and incorporate multiple viewpoints. For instance, in “Baltimore,” the speaker, while watching the television series The Wire, imagines a world in which her daughter and other neighborhood children “playing on the street … [in] the staggered light” are contrasted with the “freakish pitch of Westside Baltimore / on The Wire, its sirens and gunfire / its beleaguered cops haranguing kids /as young as six for propping up / the dealers on the corners.” The innocence of the neighborhood children, visible on the street, is juxtaposed with the darkness and criminality of six-year olds hustling drugs. The loud “sirens and gunfire” of Baltimore City depicted on The Wire is at odds with the end of the poem, in which the speaker observes a still pond in “infant sleep.” Morrissey’s ability to combine multiple angles of observation in her poetry is evident in “Lighthouse,” in which the speaker allegorizes the parallax between a cruise ship and a lighthouse on a lake with her inability to hear her son’s conversations with a friend outside. Morrissey describes the two boys as existing in “a world that can’t be entered …. in a sort of boy-talk conversation / no one else can hear.”
Morrissey’s focus on the implications of distance and perspective in Parallax often leads her to embrace diverse philosophical concepts and ideas. “Daughter” describes a mother imagining her daughter’s dreams in language; in the mother’s varying visions, the daughter grows up in a Japanese pictograph, partners with a black rat to tease a gnome, and acquires linguistic and symbolic knowledge in a manner not dissimilar to what one might experience through the use of psychedelics. At other times, Morrissey’s gaze turns toward the body and bodily functions. In “Home Birth,” Morrissey’s speaker worries about the possibility of becoming ill from a Cryptosporidium infection in her small intestine during a water birth; contrastingly, “A Day’s Blindness” sees Morrissey comparing the faint light on a cold December’s night to “the pale blue flicker of a pilot light / in a boiler’s black intestine.”
While Morrissey’s book generally engages personal and social matters, Parallax also examines realms of the political. Musing on a puzzle of a 1766 European map in “Jigsaw,” the speaker observes the borders between countries only to determine that those borders signify that a “Europe Divided in its Kingdoms / Shall be reconfigured, whole.” Although Europe is “whole” in the poem, Morrissey starkly contrasts the other continents in a critique of imperial bias: a label at bottom of the map reads “Part of Africa”; Asia is incompletely rendered, literally “rolling off” the boundaries of the puzzle. Morrissey’s critique of Western geography appears to demonstrate the negative consequences of disregarding the importance of parallax. Without perspective, discrimination against the unfamiliar goes unchecked. And in “V is for Vietnam,” Morrissey depicts majestic buildings, erected by the colonial power, in which Vietnamese women wash away wounds from bomb shrapnel; meanwhile, the speaker’s stepfather, a Vietnam War veteran, asphyxiates from PTSD-related thoughts of fighting in the jungle. Both the women and the stepfather survive, but with lines like, “The ones that survive are amphibian,” the speaker implies that each image is aware of the other — suggesting that a common ground exists between those who are involved colonialism and those who are victimized by it.
Parallax not only illustrates the importance of maintaining perspective in observation, but also underscores the salience of perspective in the reading process. Poetry expands the notions of parallax and distance to contextualize the influence of social, historical and political events on the realms of the personal and familial. Through this expanded view, Parallax teaches the reader how to approach and observe subjects in a world of diverse phenomena.
On September 5, 2014, NPR ran an by critic Juan Vidal titled, “Where Have All the Poets Gone?” which suggested that American poets no longer write political work. Because I find this assessment of contemporary American letters to be very incomplete, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a dialogue on the subject by curating a series of compelling political poems from contemporary American poets. I christened this series “Political Punch” as an affectionate reflection on the cocktail of poets who decided to honor me with their participation in my little Infoxicated Corner; it was intended to celebrate the glorious mix of poetics, voices, and life experiences all being shaken and stirred into a sense of community and conversation, being distilled into burning gulps of experience for the reader. Leaving aside all the boozed-up metaphors, it was also intended to celebrate my experience of American letters, in all their [...]
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING At night, after you close the day like a book, you grope for a bookmark. That is peace, the house’s morphine, for which you pay the bank interest. The neighbour switches off the lights – darkness becomes a sound. The moonlight rests somewhere on the terrace, making of your house its inn. On a day like today, you want to send your house on a holiday, knowing that it will return to you like a little child does, when thrown up into the sky. Once the house was your child. Now you are its slave. It behaves like a pensioner. (There are the cobwebs, the house’s cuticles, always in need of paring. Dreams make the skull of a house, you know. You spend your life looking for the house’s tail.) Once camels could pass through eyes of needles. I laughed at the folly of my ancestors. Now, as [...]
ON THE SHYNESS OF BIRDS (From A Meghalaya Travelogue) In that shiver of leaves, a certain caution lives. It is a thought as precise as suspicion. Then, inside the gaps linking rain and dawn, fall the sure gasp of song. They are not afraid, no. Every move covers the hills, navigates the clouds. There is escape, quick whip strokes in the sky, a rustle of bodies in the scrubs, but they are never here. Their songs are shadows. The leaves are shaken by visitations. The only verification is shit. (Illustration by Avirup Ghosh) _________________________________________________________________ Nitoo Das is a birder, caricaturist and poet. She teaches English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Her first collection, Boki, was published in September 2008.
Surrealist Tourist: Alessandra Bava Honors Each Exquisite Corpse By Jennifer MacBains-Stephens In They Talk About Death, Alessandra Bava’s first chapbook published in the United States (her third, internationally), Bava represents the voices of the dead through thirteen poems about Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Patti Smith, Henry Miller, Amedeo Modigliani, and Arthur Rimbaud, among others. Lives cut short by drugs, suicide, illness, and murder – these artists and writers inspire Bava’s work. In this chapbook, assembled and handmade by editor and publisher Juliet Cook, ghosts requite and haunt red-walled Parisian cafes, New York street corners, and dark, succulent gardens. It is no wonder that Bava would be able to channel many voices: she is an active participant in the World Poetry Movement, which uses poetic action to promote multinational communities that work towards social, ecological, environmental, and mental health, revering cultural diversity and social transformation. She is also a member of [...]
X Major Some images from the original archive are unavailable. Pines ARTIST’S STATEMENT: I think of these two pieces as being very deeply connected. The one big difference between them is my state of being when each was made. Pines was created about five years ago, before I had really fully realized what I was doing or who I was. Sometimes, when we are just so deep in our own circumstances, the ‘aha’ moments come in disguise. This image was one for me — the pines behind my home were my life vest until I could believe in myself. They promised me that one day my creative impulses would be integrated into my life in a way that make sense. X Major, on the other hand, was created after a sometimes-painful period of self-realization. I envisioned it in conversation with Fox Frazier-Foley’s collection of poems, Exodus in X Minor. For [...]