Paul Breslin, in his introduction to The Psycho-Political Muse, outlines the psychological theories influencing the radical poetry of the 1950s and 60s. Finding that the psyche is culturally conditioned, recent psychological theories found that neurosis can be identified as a type of resistance to social norms. Correlatively, art was seen as counter-acting repression, freeing consciousness from the constraints dominating the acculturated ego. In this context, the rhetoric of the New Left shifts, according to Breslin, from focus on class struggle to the opposition of “the falsification of consciousness in all classes.” Liberation from “the system” or “the establishment” was thought to come, not so much from the overthrow of economic relations, but through the individual’s “relative immunity” to society’s interlocking network of illusions. As such, poets “had only to look about [themselves], or even into [their] own soul[s], to be confronted with the crisis of American society,” making the private [...]

Suits black ink faded to green and stretched over weathered fingers the tribal heart an illusion due to my grandmother’s name layers of memory etched into his skin five cents a name and twenty dollars to hide his impulsive nature I never knew the other woman the symbols of his past shine through grease and scars and sweat and his honest work tools held aloft like a sabre hands that fixed all the people around them but still broke every thing they touched pieces of video recorders and televisions still litter our world I remember tracing each image with tiny fingers and feeling dwarfed by his greatness he lead by example those identifying marks saved him when I could not recognise his clean shaven face and screamed for my bearded oddball the diamond, the heart the spade and the club I learned the value of when to fold and spent [...]

LANDSCAPE ____________________________________________ Tom Sleigh has won numerous awards, including the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters,The Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Guggenheim Foundation grant. He currently serves as director of Hunter College’s MFA program in Creative Writing. He is the recipient of the Anna-Maria Kellen Prize and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin for Fall 2011. His most recent book is Army Cats.

Primalism: the testing for all aesthetic value wagered on the energies of the primal, the root, the raw, the atavistic, the unconscious, with a corresponding mistrust of the social conventions, the art of the decorative and contrived, and, above all, a dismissal of the thinking faculty save in its aspect as “process of ongoing revery.” A primalist will tend to play down the aphoristic and proverbial didactics of pre-romantic writers, and judge such pre-romantic works for their dynamism, their underlying sexual/political connotations, and their foreshadowing of romantic-modernist concerns. In effect, Shakespeare’s polyglot flights of decorative speech, rather than being loved in and of themselves as word play, will be seen as a slight impediment rather than the chief glory of his work, and the rather conventional, pro-monarchy, pro-triumphalist, mob despising politics of Shakespeare will be “rehabilitated” as it were to fit some process of liberation or revolution which the bard [...]

Related Linkage _____________________________________________________________ Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), winner the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A former Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she’s currently a doctoral candidate and King/Chávez/Parks Fellow at Western Michigan University. Eryn Cruft lives in Bloomington, IN but will soon be leaving for London to study for a Master’s degree in Language and Cognition at King’s College. Previous collaborations with Traci Brimhall have appeared in Guernica and Nashville Review. Eryn has also contributed work to the Undergraduate Journal of Cognitive Science.

Visual Poetry Rachael Briggs is a research fellow in the philosophy department at the Australian National University, and writes poetry to unwind. She is the winner of the 2011 Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry, and the cafe poet at the Cafe Checcocho (through the Australian Poetry Centre’s Cafe Poet program).

Myth of Cosmos It stands outside of myself, something round, flecked with spit, like a moon« growing out of my nails, moon« of phenomenal lactescence. I push my head into the roundess & a cloud« is my face & I see particles of mist« floating away. There’s nothing I can do or limb or crook of elbow, inutile & something is growing under my tongue, a word, a love« A deer falls from my eyes, rolls down my cheek, & I name the cloud« with the overgrown tongue & a brush of flowers falls on my face to toe I’m blessed, blessing painted on my nails my palms I d«ance, palm flashing thigh buckling silvered belly stars. ___________________________________________________________ Monica Mody is the author of two chapbooks, and her work can also be found in journals such as the Boston Review, Wasafiri, Upstairs at Duroc, pyrta, Lantern Review, and Nether, among [...]

1. So what are some other major facets of Ashbery’s relationship to American pragmatism? How would we characterize pragmatism, and in what ways does Ashbery’s work suggest our characterization? Does Ashbery ever explicitly mention James, Dewey, or Rorty? (I know of only one place currently where Rorty mentions Ashbery; it is in his introduction to Essays on Heidegger and Others, where he writes, “I have given up on the attempt to find something common to Michal Graves’s buildings, Pynchon and Rushdie’s novels, Ashbery’s poems, various sorts of popular music, and the writings of Heidegger and Derrida.” (Rorty, 1) Ashbery does explicitly mention James, in a poem called, appropriately, “My Philosophy of Life.” The passage in question reads, But then you remember something William James wrote in some book of his you never read–it was fine, it had the fineness, the powder of life dusted over it, by chance, of course, [...]

The Magic Cat by Andre, Year 6 Stanmore Public School The feline stands as proud as a lion. It is as blue as the eyes of a dark panther. Its journey comes across the valley of the kings. Its whiskers white as a dwarf star. Even if its head is like the desert, Its body becomes the waves. Its gemstone is hard and heavy, Though can be lifted with the greatest of ease. Its silence is the call of the wind, And its presence is the breeze. The talisman is the only thing we have, Even though we have a lot. It didn’t cost much, but its value to us is far more. It is an Egyptian symbol, The last she could find. My mother travelled the world, Before she met my father. She got a monk to carry it across the Egyptian desert. And now she has given it [...]

This entry is part of a series, Ashbery and Pragmatist Poetics» Introduction: Why the Lyric Essay? 1. I want to start with a problem: an overwhelming, close to paralyzing sense that an essay about John Ashbery’s poetry is like a representational critique of a cubist painting. The two (essay and poetry) just feel ill-fitting, strange bedfellows, as though a parent (the essayist), out of the desire to understand her son (the poet), gave him a lesson in thermodynamics. Ashbery can be theromodynamically complex, yet such a lesson would seem to miss the point, not to mention the fun. New forms of interpretation are needed to come close to an approximation to what Ashbery is doing. 2. So how do we approach him? One day I made a list of various things that go into an Ashbery poem. I’d just read Philip Levine’s “They Feed They Lion,” and, inspired, I decided [...]

The Poetry Object encourages young writers and their teachers submit poems and photographs about objects that are special to them. Springing from The Red Room Company’s education program, The Poetry Object is a free writing project for students attending NSW Public Schools in the Sydney Region. Special objects that inspired poems in 2011 included coffee machines, beloved pets and books, the Quran, cricket bats, musical instruments, jewellery and clothing, revealing the rich meanings that objects acquire as irreplaceable parts of our lives. As part of The Poetry Object 2012, six celebrated Australian poets have been commissioned to write new poems about their own talismanic objects. Winner of the Thomas Sharpcott Prize, ; performance poet and fellow Sharpcott Prize winner ; Judith Wright Prize runner-up ; 2011 City of Sydney Poet, ; , an exciting new voice in poetry; and the inimatable . For three months The State Library of NSW [...]

Francis Thompson 1859-1907 by Robert Adamson He slept by the Thames in newspapers, a makeshift blanket, fevered talk. A loaded opium pipe. How much did it cost for his pencil to curve across pages? At dawn a red fox limped past and unsettled the sparrows. Francis drew down words, one at a time— worried about his best lines as they appeared in print. He addressed envelopes in a curved hand to enfold his poems— then walked to the Post Office at Charing Cross. A century later, I read ‘The Hound of Heaven’ by a river in New South Wales, hear a bitter chuckle before his ‘running laughter’— revelation’s soundtrack. has lived near the Hawkesbury River for most of his life. A series of juvenile misdemeanours resulted in him being sent to various detention centres. It was during this period that he first began writing poetry. His first book, Canticles on [...]

Exile: an invitation to a struggle (from My Rice tastes like the lake. Berkeley, CA: Apogee Press, 2011) Mother tells me to eat well. Mother who knows best, asks, how are you? She has asked this all of my life. There are only two answers to this question. Two answers keep us mother and son, mother and daughter. The distance is a question. The question is also a statement of a struggle. If the word is a struggle, you understand. We cannot continue as we are. We cannot forget we are guests who have overstayed. I invite you to living against (as we do.) It is not enough to have one tongue. It cannot point to everything and in every direction. We do not use our mother tongue for our lovers. Beloved, we speak your words. What do we want? Freedom. When do we want it? Now. Protest in the [...]

This entry is part of a series, Redux» Aristotle defines phronesis in the following manner: We may grasp the nature of prudence [phronesis] if we consider what sort of people we call prudent. Well, it is thought to be the mark of a prudent man to be able to deliberate rightly about what is good and advantageous . . . But nobody deliberates about things that are invariable . . . So . . . prudence cannot be science [episteme] or art [techne]; not science because what can be done is a variable (it may be done in different ways, or not done at all), and not art because action and production are generically different. For production aims at an end other than itself; but this is impossible in the case of action, because the end is merely doing well. What remains, then, is that it is a true state, [...]

Chittagong A kennings poem for Bellevue Hill Public School Rusted whales beached in the Bay of Bengal. Ribs dismantled, returned to metalled mud. Ships splinter, brittle as bone. No time to carve tombstones in sand. Blueprints don’t detail these distances or depths, boys hide and seek in hulls. Debris blazes on scrapyard shores. Fractured shifts of salvaged sleep, dreams set adrift with tomorrow’s satellites. Below, there is a broken city, the ocean can’t recall all it has kept. __________________________________________________________ Tamryn Bennett is an Australian writer and visual artist currently living in Mexico. Since 2004 she has exhibited artists books (Showers and Clearing and Polaroids and Postcards) illustrations and comics in Sydney, Melbourne and Mexico. Her poetry, illustrations and articles have appeared in Five Bells, Nth Degree, Mascara Literary Review and various academic publications. She has a PhD in ‘Comics Poetry’ from The University of New South Wales and when in [...]