The Hills A wolf whistle sounds. Street level shot of an apartment complex at night, windows lit. “Heidi and Spencer’s Apartment, Hollywood, CA” say white letters at the bottom of the screen. Shot of Heidi’s torso in a room with white walls. She has on a black, low-cut halter dress with russet trim. As she pivots her body, the tip of her bleached hair appears on her tanned shoulders. She lifts one hand to her face. Her face is out of the shot. Spencer appears to be sitting, back to the camera. He is in the left hand corner of the screen. All that can be seen of him is his torso and the back of his curly blonde head. He is wearing a white t-shirt and is out of focus. Heidi is in focus. Heidi walks across the room, back to Spencer. “That looks good,” says Spencer. “Those the [...]

The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. Edited by Ron Padgett, with an introduction by Paul Auster. Library of America. 535 pp. $35. In the first volume of her diaries, Susan Sontag, on an off day in 1957, begins listing, in no particular order and with no reason stated, an odd assortment of memories from her childhood and early youth. It may be that the desire to write down (and ransom from oblivion) moments on the face of it trivial but somehow still persistent in memory comes occasionally to all reflective people. Certainly it does to many writers. Four or five years after Sontag’s journal entry, the painter and poet Joe Brainard began a work composed of several hundred disparate vignettes drawn from his past, each recorded in a thumbnail paragraph, each beginning with the incantatory phrase, “I remember.” Not billed as either poetry or prose, the book can be classed [...]

Some smart folks insist Nat King Cole doesn’t get enough credit for his vital and historical role in Jazz trio piano playing. Hell, I’ve often said it. In point of fact, it’s been said so often that it isn’t true. We should qualify as such: Nat King Cole gets plenty of credit as the revolutionary pianist who gets no credit. He’s like the underrated ball player who keeps getting called the underrated ball player and has his face plastered on Time as well as Sports Illustrated. We might even call such a ball player: “the most overrated underrated ball player.” As for Cole, he is not underrated, and he did far more than pave the way for Jazz trios and small forces (though paving the way for smaller ensembles is a good enough thing considering post-war music union strikes and the rise of the crooner which made big bands expensive [...]

This entry is part of a series, Unlocked» Jumanji a group poem Trunk packed and ready for nowhere, Manuscript tells stories in spots and dashes called songs. Song list on the lampbase doubling as a microphone, The man looks lonely and lost As though he’s taken one last look before leaving It reminds me of Jumanji. What is the lion doing in the house with a police hat on? The light is on and it’s already daytime. The boundary line between the man and the lion: The antique collector’s lounge. __________This is one scary cat. __________He dominates the room. This is the lion’s domain, The man is his pet It’s a jungle in there, _____This strange man’s den. Cat in a hat. There’s a dog wearing a cop hat. The dooryard echoes of an open suitcase. _____________________________________________________ The John Morony Correctional Complex is located 5 km south of Windsor. A [...]

from KING OF THE FOREST from City of Moths My friend thinks that poetry has nothing to do with words. Poetry she says, is a mountain. An actual mountain. A thing that fools climb simply “because it’s there.” Poetry is there, but why do we constantly feel the need to prove it exists? To point to it? Like a mountain appearing in the distance. “Be an uncarved block of wood” is what the Sarah Lawrence kids, who hadn’t slept in 40-some hours, still high off ecstasy and acid, sitting Indian-style on the rock, otherwise-silent, would shout at me during tennis matches. They were right. What lies in the uncarved block of wood. Whorls and grains, stories and held smoke. Surrounded by. My block of wood, another person’s mountain. The sound of a finger pointing to some unseen thing. To be reckoned with, or perhaps, reckoned by. Something to draw a [...]

This entry is part of a series, Unlocked» Unlocked is an educational program developed and run by The Red Room Company in collaboration with NSW Correctional Centres. The program aims to unlock the potential of inmates through the transformative possibilities of poetry. Australian poets are taken into the centres to run intensive writing workshops, working with the students on every stage of the writing process, from the initial exercises and experimentations, through the editing and rewriting process, to recording, performing and publishing their work in a professionally designed print anthology. You can . Piloted in Sydney in 2010, the project has now entered its third year. The most recent Unlocked project was held at the Balund-a Project, a residential diversionary program for male and female offenders between 18 and 40. The program has a strong Indigenous focus, which is also a focus for Unlocked for 2012. Indigenous poet Lionel Fogarty [...]

Automatonophilia Love of things that falsely represent a sentient being You married a marionette for the lumbering way that she succumbs to teeth. You saw; she sways and says okay. And she admires the daze you move in, hydroplaning days away: exultant accidents. Instead of me, a blissful wooden girl; a wooden knee submitted for exhibit. Deadened trees: the shelter you inhabit. And didn’t we expect it, eking out animatronic epochs on the sofa? Both electric— me with boredom; you ran programs: tricks for trenchant eyes. Disguised, the lists you ticked led straight to this. Your love nest: nuts and bolts, no musts. No lust. No faults, and no one’s fault. from on . ______________________________________________________ Jessica Piazza‘s first full-length collection of poems, Interrobang, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2013. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature and Creative [...]

I came by Oppen in 1979 via the wonderful–to my way of thinking–historically significant anthology, A Geography of Poets. I remember liking his poem, “Street” and memorizing it, then going no further. I was never one to devour poets (except Roethke, Williams, Stevens, and, weirdly, May Swenson). I preferred anthologies where, if the editor was wise, you would begin to hear the poems holding court and having a conversation with each other. I knew all the chestnuts by Frost, the major poems of Dylan Thomas, the typical schmeer of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Donne, Byron, Langston Hughes, Whitman, Dickinson, and so on and so forth, but I was never as interested in poets as in certain poems: “Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” the Dickinson poem that begins “I dreaded that first robin so,” Dylan Thomas’ “The Boy’s of Summer” and so on. [...]

This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» Fountain 77, Glebe For Timothy Yu Plastic-sheathed roses embroider the dark. _________________Set to volplane we take photo-triptychs, each of the other. Moments of daring oscillate in the strangers we become. _________________And arms betray us, they link our assembly of states, ventriloquised, ________cravassed by cloud, echoes, reason’s sastruga faults, whole continents of inaccuracy ________rumoured, unrumoured. Making for the 336, syllables cleft as we inhale olfactory flakes, a wrapping scrapes the asphalt ___________in our roan-coloured quarter. Parting, of course, is not sinking like some Titanic hybrid, cobalt-feathered ________________favouring métissage, ________but a cold coming— ________So riddled —are we? _____________________________________________________ Michelle Cahill is a Sydney poet, author of two collections of poetry and two chapbooks. Vishvarupa and Night Birds are her most recent books. She received the Val Vallis Award and was highly commended in the Wesley Michel Wright Prize. Entries in this series: The [...]

Elegy for a Forty-Three Pound Woman with Mental Retardation Autumn and you are in your mother’s house. __________Plants no longer turn _____but fail down to the soil _______________from which they sprung. To be sure I can’t speak properly to you until Winter _____when the kindly rescuer appeared to find you alive and moving, resuscitating a growing need on a soiled mattress __________—whisper body— one chain away from death in a room you’ve never escaped. _____Thus you, my joyless seed, sprout. ____________________Could you often hear _____the butchers’ feast being torn into by mouths in the outer rooms? Partitioned again the body that is end-stopped. This world __________did not fall from my head. _____An ornate impotence arose with the descent of you, and instead of the too much to say to tell a truth, I’m burdened by a phlegm-thick mouth, my sounds _______________throat bound and the entire vocal __________apparatus breaks at the [...]

Mayakovsky’s Revolver By Matthew Dickman WW Norton Forthcoming October 2012 ISBN 978-0-393-08119-0 112 pages Matthew Dickman received the second fan letter I’ve ever written. The first was written in 1989, when I was ten years old, and it was addressed to Howard Johnson, an infielder for the New York Mets. Johnson—or “HoJo,” to baseball cognoscenti—wore a mustache, was a streaky but potentially game-changing offensive player, and served as a modest liability in the field. He received zero votes in his lone appearance on a Baseball Hall of Fame ballot in 2001. In 2008, after I’d all but forgotten my letter to HoJo, I came across Matthew Dickman’s first book, , at Portland’s great independent bookstore, Powell’s. I learned from a shelf display that Dickman was just a couple years older than I, and that we’d both grown up in Southeast Portland. I bought the book and wrote to him at [...]

This entry is part of a series, In a Dark Room» It was late in the smoke-painted bar, a quarter past the blue hour, when The Interviewer pulled The Poet into an even darker room. And in the dark of that darkness, came the first question. Tell me, said the Interviewer, where do your poems live? You’re asking so you must have them and have them alive in the hand you hope will one day hold me. The dark room was the color of closed eyelids now. Music reached in through a window deprived of its pane. With his eyes on the music, The Interviewer asked What was the last sin your poems committed? My friend, my friend, I was born to a father who didn’t want what I am. I am doing reference work in sin, and born to fuck married men with no shame in confessing it. This [...]

This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» The Disappearing Suite They hover on the edges, their voices haunting the blue hour when the tide of memory recedes and forgetfulness returns, washing over the ash-prints of their passing, so faint, yet so fresh you can’t tell if the moment is disappearing or about to happen, if something is being written or erased, your body still alive with the touch, the echo of their breath, their absence a faint shiver in the curtain and you wait in the silence between words, between forgetting and remembering. __________________* Between pages, books, stations, between one life and the next the list of the disappeared grows, a book writing itself, a ledger bulging with absences, a map where the empty quarter spreads, advancing sands erasing the traces of the disappeared, and you are on a floe shrinking with each vanishing, each face and place [...]

INVISIBLE FUNERAL IN ONE ACT A bird runs into a window Enter: A woman (who looks like me) staring at the patterns on a Persian rug __Enter: A stagehand, carrying a mirror The woman tapes black construction paper over the mirror When she stares at the rug and then back at the blacked- out mirror, neon ghosts of paisley fractals squirm A bird runs into a window & I watch It strikes its beak with its own beak Previously Entered: Maurice Blanchot Maurice Blanchot stands by a desk lamp in the corner & notes: __It is striking that at this very moment, when the cadaverous presence is Enter: the woman (who is me) staring at the reflected patterns on her face__ Enter: the television projecting a woman (who is not me) staring at a family photograph and saying ___________& I didn’t ___________recognize Maurice Blanchot scratches his head __He writes: __when [...]

LMB:You talk about the body as a representation of the world around us – it is. Everything we are is everything there is. But the body may not be the only way we exist. If our hair is the war, , and the war is our body, does writing keep us from falling apart? Does our writing become extraphysical? CA: Thank you so much for this opportunity to be interviewed. I’m punchy. Last night I woke to smoke and fire engines. The building next to mine was on fire, the building I SHARE A WALL WITH, and I had to crawl down three flights of steps because the smoke was thick. It’s SO NICE to be alive and writing to you!! But I want to say to your question that while I was standing on the street watching firemen chop a hole into my neighbor’s roof and pour hundreds of [...]