from [Practicing Vigilance] I’m looting the altars of my former forgiveness like a cacophony of snow blowers I’m between making dinner plans and opening a can of sunshine onto the supernal room standing in a very quiet desert forcing the mean soliloquies out with their un-simulated volcanic ash hardening my exact replica. I used to [...]
Conformity is motivated by a need for communal belonging or acceptance, or to deflect the worse pains and consequences of failing to be accepted by one’s desired group. Based on the anxiety of expulsion, punishment and ostracism, or disapproval and towards the enjoyment of privilege and status. When failing to conform, or when losing face, [...]
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 [...]
This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» 58, black-most lot, collapsible ceiling and underground lung ward My dear RG. Crates are melting under enamel and asbestos; whalers are jumping ship for a slant of this rummy sham. Open the archive to check the mobility, there’s a rotten panorama of a hundred years of [...]
This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» The Disappearing is a new app for , and that (literally) explores poetry and place. Beginning with a collection of over 100 poems about Sydney, the app creates a poetic map charting traces, fragmentary histories, impressions and memories. Along with previously unpublished poetry, The Disappearing features [...]
Federal Bureau of Investigation you give great masthead take it from me I have a microphone where my soul is supposed to go if you put your ear up to it you can hear the future ten thousand girls going crazy at a chess match and we’re not coming out of this closet for any [...]
Power is arbitrary when it steps out from the laws of the system it generates, fosters, or embodies, thus causing the system to scramble and struggle to “explain” and fit this act to the laws inherent in the system. The most blatant example of this would the way a culture might explain the arbitrary force [...]
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 [...]
I guess poets are all trying to swim in the same stream – the same stream as Shakespeare and Yeats and Sappho and Hughes and Carson – and whatever strokes we make, large or small, are a striving to be part of that same vast human conversation. - Candy Royalle Some images from the original [...]
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 [...]
We often talk of attention in terms of power, but perhaps inattention is more suitable to a consumer/service culture. Certain catch phrases such as “don’t sweat the small stuff” or “stick to the point” or “just the facts” hint that we are a busy, practical, and rather diseased race of grade C newspaper reporters. We [...]
J and I get to talking, I ask her how long she’s been an astronomer. It doesn’t seem to me like something you just stumble into. There is a moment, she tells me, for all astronomers, a moment of realisation, or epiphany, I suppose. The moment when you first notice – really notice – the [...]
Author’s statement: In the summer of 2012, M.A, Vizsolyi visited Ronnie Yates in Houston, Texas, where it was hot as a mofo. They took walks beneath the live oaks, sweated their asses off, and at night, on the roof of Nick Flynn’s apartment (Nick was away in Paris), they began a collaboration tentatively titled, “It’d [...]
This entry is part of a series, OF LAMB by Matthea Harvey» Samantha Zighelboim: How did you become interested in the process of erasure? Matthea Harvey: I first read about erasures in Heather McHugh’s wonderful book, Broken English. There’s an image from Tom Phillips’s A Humument (which I adore) on the cover and her essay, [...]
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 [...]
This entry is part of a series, Clubs and Societies» i’ve been inspired by pia’s practice and the conversations that i’ve been having with pia about tekhne ghosts huanted media and the strange things that she does with electrictiy and i’m particularly taken by this phrase she has of letting the non-human life live so [...]
