True standards are physical measurements. All other standards are evil metaphors of measurement created by systems of power to maintain control and to replace thinking. All standards are a form of virtual thinking–the law put in place to preclude any daily or ongoing assessment of values–to avoid all questioning. This is why I hate grants and would prefer that someone who believed in my art just chucked me enough money that I could be an artist without having to comply with “Standards” I had no hand in making and which, to me, an old tool maker who constantly measured, are no real measure of anything except arbitrary whim and the power of gatekeepers. This is how it works: systems prove their “moral” or aesthetic aptness by imposing, maintaining, enforcing, and setting standards that then take the place of real and thoughtful assessment. Challenge to these standards by certain necessary “rebels” [...]

L’Olive: sonnet 28 My tongue cannot resist disclosing all I feel for you, when from you I’m away, but suddenly, feeling you nearby, it says nothing—-left dumbstruck and deaf, words stall. Thus hope makes guarantees while duping me: I am less there, the more I’m in your presence. What eludes me pleases me immensely: I desire that which I refuse to keep. I am joyful by night and sad all day, having in sleep what, waking, will not stay: my good’s a falsehood, my evil ever true. I brood for one who’s faultless, best commended. Therefore, Love, if there’s charity in you, make my life brief, or night make never-ending. L’Olive: sonnet 28 Ce, que je sen’, la langue ne refuse _____Vous decouvrir, quand suis de vous absent, _____Mais tout soudain que pres de moy vous sent, _____Elle devient & muette, & confuse. Ainsi, l’espoir me promect, & m’abuse, _____Moins [...]

Last year, CAConrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon—a book that encompassed a perfect blend of street insolence and elegiac tribute—was published. Raunchy and tantrumy, insightful and spiritually reverent, Rumpelstilskin-stampingly angry, and uproariously hilarious, it was a kind of hash oil distilled from its author’s originality and strangeness, and an unforgettable hymn of praise to the work of others. Over a year later, each re-reading is not merely a return to something puissant and relevant, but a trip to a landscape that, like certain atramentous or transcendental places in the heart, turn out to be knowable only when you come to them. Marsupial is a work of pretty much unlimited generosity that is is there for you when you need it, and it has a portal and a therapy for every condition: love, loss, ecstasy, rage. The (soma)tic exercises in Marsupial’s title are derived from Soma, a sacred Vedic drink and the [...]

I admit I didn’t like Denise Levertov’s work when I was a kid. I preferred the hilarity of Ted Berrigan, the obvious authority and beauty of Stevens, the light but dazzling cool of Frank O’Hara, and Ginsberg’s Kaddish as well as Reality Sandwiches. I was even more a fan of Spanish and Latin American poets–Hernandez and Vallejo in particular. I came to admire Levertov only after I was approaching forty and she had recently died. I was old enough then to appreciate her seriousness of purpose. I came to admire her the way I had Muriel Rukeyser. According to my friend Joel Lewis, Levertov fell out of favor when she embraced the catholic faith and started writing poems about her religion. Recently, her letters with Robert Duncan have put her on the radar again. She was also heavily involved in the protest movements of the 60’s–the anti-war movement in particular.That [...]

End of Lifed The angels, those constant followers, stay dumb to metaphors, deafer to jokes. Outside firm circles, however, the idea of decay as a transitional state meets with uncommon success. Props and shout-outs to the flesh, the flesh, and the flesh for keeping caps on myth-proliferation, though experts trouble to isolate origins, what wags what. Planets, Virgins, Eternal Recurrence: done it, done it, doing it. And The Bosom of Abraham: don’t get me started. The same assholes who bully us here will bully us there, in much tighter quarters, and management will, predictably, console us with loopholes and pleas for patience. Maybe some species of bliss—let’s hope we can dream—can be found in that queer and crowded place, but where neither release nor hygiene nor the world wide web are guaranteed, there can be no rest. As we speak, exegetes elsewhere defend that extratextual innovation but number-one-requested feature, a [...]

Christopher Phelps said something interesting about Buber and the cult of personality. He tied it into the poetry scene, which makes it especially interesting to me (You could also tie it into a certain extent with why indie bands muted the role of the singer in the grunge era, still do to a certain extent by making the lyrics purposely subsumed into the overall mix, but this, to me leads only to fake humility–and inaudible lyrics–which is the height of arrogance). Still, I had to go back to my Buber (which anyone who had me at Arts High knows I talked of incessantly): I equate his take on the cult of personality with insistence on a self as personage rather than as person–the self as set off apart from the dynamic of communion between I and thou, I and you, and I and it–the self as commodity, as product, as [...]

. Late in the forest I did Cupid see _____Cold, wet, and crying, he had lost his way, _____And being blind was farther like to stray: _____Which sight a kind compassion bred in me, I kindly took and dried him, while that he, _____Poor child, complained he starved was with stay, _____And pined for want of his accustomed prey, _____For none in that wild place his host would be, I glad was of his finding, thinking sure _____This service should my freedom still procure _____And in my arms I took him then unharmed Carrying him unto a myrtle bower _____But in the way he made me feel, his power, _____Burning my heart who had him kindly warmed. ______________________________________________ Lady Mary Wroth was an English poet of the Renaissance. She wrote The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, the first extant prose romance by an English woman, and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the first [...]

Not too long ago, blessed with my usual late summer/fall insomnia, I woke up at 2 in the morning and knew I would not be going to bed again anytime soon. I’d fallen asleep at 11, and so I’d had the 3 hours most insomniacs know, are just enough to preclude any further hours of sleep. The next day I would be at the university from 10 until 7:30 at night. I resigned myself to this state of affairs, and wrote a diatribe against vacuity which I then erased. I read some Lorca. I wondered why they had made Brad Pitt, buff as he may have been, Achilles. I searched for my old video of Kalifornia since for some perverse reason, movies about serial murderers or bad action films lull me to sleep. Brad Pitt is much better in Kalifornia, and I decided it was not his lack of physical [...]

on falling in love I love how you burst through the door and look around. I love how bad you are at hiding the fact that you’re trying to find me— and how trapped I feel when you’re nearby. I love how when you see me your mouth falls open, how another mouth extends from within the first mouth, both mouths drooling, like you want to bite my head off, literally crush me in an extended hug, take me back to your nest and secure me in jelly-like tentacles. It turns out you do. These are just some of the things I love about you, Alien. I’m not even sure of your gender, but in the heat of the moment, does it matter? ______________________________________________ Aaron Belz is the author of two books of poetry, The Bird-Hoverer and Lovely, Raspberry. A third collection, Glitter Bomb, is forthcoming in 2014. Belz lives [...]

“Dear Mark” by Martin Rock Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013 ISBN 978-1936767199 When teaching poetry to middle school students, “ekphrasis” was often our go-to source of instant inspiration. Many kids freeze at open writing, and actively rebel against instructions (rightfully so), but when presented with an image, film, song, or other piece of art to write against, opinions would fly and reflect around the room. Which isn’t to say that ekphrastic writing is easy. As something to dig from, great lines can be mined, but there’s no guarantee. To really connect with a work, to entwine your contribution as inseparably as possible, is a next-level challenge for the ekphrastic writer. With Dear Mark, a chapbook recently published by the Brooklyn Arts Press, poet Martin Rock opens a dialogue with the work of visual artist Mark Rothko, with engaging results. One of the barriers of ekphrastic writing can be the need for [...]

“Gene Tanta comes from a land where the place of words and even of letters was challenged one hundred years ago. Tristan Tzara, born and educated in a very small town of Eastern Romania, Moineşti, as Samuel Rosenstock, and Isidore Isou, pen name of Ioan-Isidor Goldstein, broke the new wood between mimetic language and language as material. Twisting together the spectral traces of the Romanian and North American avant-gardes via the “fronde” (Dada’s sling against illusionist art) and the formal concerns of the Language poets, Tanta continues the path blazed by Tzara and Isou. Pastoral Emergency asks how words or even letters still manage to coexist without colliding after such a cultural and universal “Big Bang”?” – Radu Andriescu “From “all that glitters” to “catch some Z’s before you zag,” Gene Tanta’s Pastoral Emergency is a vertiginous alphabetical romp. The twenty-six poems deconstruct each letter into a surreal and hypnotic [...]

Prologue I’m in the middle of rehearsals for a new theatre piece for which I’ve written both the script and music. For me, rehearsals have always been a time of exciting discovery and profound disappointment. This time is no different. No matter how I try to impart the music in my head, be it written on the page or modeled in my voice or on the piano, I’ve got to accept all that’s inevitably lost in the process—all that won’t make it from my imagination and into the ensemble’s performance. Publishing a poem is similarly fraught, isn’t it? Poets have intentions as they write. And I’ve got to believe that even the most hermetic or self-assured poet, alike, wants to communicate something specific, has intentions, whatever they might be. Readers will likely recognize some of those intentions but it’s unlikely that those intentions will bear upon the reader in the [...]

Introduction for October: Being Unreal I don’t know about you, but my right-now life is laden with reality: bills, the 9-to-5 (necessary to pay said bills), the leaden thing that weighs on everyone at said 9-to-5 (making them mean and me mean), family, the failures of family, a slowing metabolism and no will or energy to exercise. It’s a maddeningly endless personal abyss. And the language that surrounds me every day–mostly sad, simple transactional language–fails. Yet the poems I’m sharing this darkening October month come from writers who somehow manage to slip out of the trance that keeps us subservient to reality, tethered to the mundane. When they lapse into consciousness, they are possessed as Nietzsche was when he wrote “No artist tolerates reality.” Those who are awake, if only momentarily, are the artists. And by artists, I mean these writers who feel and tinker until they’ve given form to [...]

Dear Beast Loveliness: Poems of the Body By Tim J. Myers ISBN 978-1609641238 BlazeVOX Reviewed by Grace Stansbery In Dear Beast Loveliness, Tim J. Myers explores the physical and spiritual existences pertaining to the body. “The most profound of all human experiences is simply having a body,” he writes, and “of all our universal realities, it’s certainly the most fundamental.” Myers’ poetry rejects the preconceived notion, propagated by religious extremism, that the body is “essentially foul”, along with more modern conceptions of it as “pure machinery producing the illusion of self.” Riding the gray area (in typical 2013 fashion), Dear Beast Loveliness’s poems waver back and forth between wet dream and in-body-etherealism. In one representative poem, Myers utilizes concepts like Voyager’s robot sensors in conjunction with the tiny heartbeat from a fetal monitor to ask the question: “Which [is] more mysterious, and which came from further away?” The book is [...]

Introduction for October: Being Unreal I don’t know about you, but my right-now life is laden with reality: bills, the 9-to-5 (necessary to pay said bills), the leaden thing that weighs on everyone at said 9-to-5 (making them mean and me mean), family, the failures of family, a slowing metabolism and no will or energy to exercise. It’s a maddeningly endless personal abyss. And the language that surrounds me every day–mostly sad, simple transactional language–fails. Yet the poems I’m sharing this darkening October month come from writers who somehow manage to slip out of the trance that keeps us subservient to reality, tethered to the mundane. When they lapse into consciousness, they are possessed as Nietzsche was when he wrote “No artist tolerates reality.” Those who are awake, if only momentarily, are the artists. And by artists, I mean these writers who feel and tinker until they’ve given form to [...]