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 Along with previously unpublished poetry, The Disappearing features exclusive videos of readings and interviews with poets. Users can upload their own poems to The Disappearing, preserving ideas, emotions and experiences about their own environment that vanish over time. Explore Sydney streets or upload your own memories of place – Download The Disappearing – The Red Room Company’s free poetry app for iPhone and iPad or for Android. Entries in this series: The Disappearing: Introduction The Disappearing: Astrid Lorange The Disappearing: John Hawke The Disappearing: Nick Bryant-Smith The Disappearing: Fiona Wright The Disappearing: David Prater The Disappearing: Bronwyn Emily Lang The Disappearing: Kim Cheng [...]

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 amount of Klondike Bars a bird with a broken song is still a threat wind can commit murder and will if left unchecked my big black car breathes or bleeds a huge floating lung above the parking lot dripping privilege and something yellow what would you write in the wet cement is a test question that blanks me like snow arrested for conspiracy I need an air-craft carrier of coffee right now skin is our biggest enemy untaxable & international like the sky freeloading crowd pleasing changing at will without a pill or talk-show host [...]

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 of a great natural catastrophe as an “act” of God, either to “punish” or test his believers. The transference of an arbitrary force into a “willed” act and further, an act with a purposeful intent relieves the stress, and hides the possibility that, if the storm is merely arbitrary then the system cannot explain its own reason for being and may be arbitrary (a system that admits to being arbitrary is not long for this world) There is an evolution of this thinking toward “mystery.” One admits one does not know, then builds a piety [...]

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 stanza of The Good Morrow is as dramatic as any Lana Del Rey song or Minnis poem. I think the real issue is that people have a problem with feminine melodramatics; it’s why Plath became the poster child for some crass concept of Confessionalism (even though another melodramatic man, Robert Lowell, is really responsible for that whole mess) in spite of the fact that she was a master craftsman and genius of the literary costume. So, I think it’s a gendered issue more than a simple one of dramatic/not-dramatic. The “problem” with girly melodrama in [...]

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 archive are unavailable. The Scrimmage There is violence here an abundance of it fists and elbows and tongues that lash out ankles and knees that fight to keep balance ________this is violence. There are gestures of thrusting hips arms extended anger exposed speed enticed by wheels of rubber and steel sounds of strained voices ________this is violence. Apparently there is no fresh meat here. These skates are worn by bearers of flesh experienced to the feel of burning skin red raw from fishnets rubbing surfaces exposed to the elements of an unforgiving floor ________this is [...]

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 out his hands, twin flames, volcanic rock. In the room, I mapped out an archipelago of needs— mine, then his, then my father’s. Stray rocks, a map. Doc, you call it schema, me shut-eyed, my cousin’s hostile need. I dreamt my arms were raised. I think in surrender. I’ve been studying Freud’s On Dreams, wish fulfillment, my cousin’s hostile need. He returns like a wild obsession. (There, like a skein in my dreams.) Archipelago of desire. I skip stones, one to another. My mother’s shame, father’s cold and brutal shielding. There was more tenderness in [...]

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 don’t like verbal noise, but we can get arrogant in our “simplicity” and opt for the simplistic, especially when it suits our self-interest or plays into our prejudice as to who and what should not be listened to. I will map out 12 kinds of inattention that I have perceived working in aesthetic, political, social, and sexual realms, many of which involve a sort of metonymy dynamic of omission (things we leave out thinking it stands for the whole, in order to exclude, in order to prioritize, in order to act, in order to flee/fight/freeze, [...]

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 vast night sky above in all its wonder and mystery. How it hangs there like a question, an invitation, a vast, glittering sphinx’s mask. They call the moment “First Light.” - Kit Brookman The Theory Of Everything 1. Stars hang there like broken glass in night’s gut. They are slick along the sky, the night is choked with them as a city is with light. The dead grass is made metal by starlight, my shadow batters the earth when I had been ready to put it in my back pocket for the night, but 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 be a little cooler not to Rock This,” from which this poem is taken. Houston Poem 26 this moment she’s flowering there were boys around her that does suck i agree with that talk about that grief i would have been like ‘whoa’ morality is a bitch but dude morality will grind your ass it will fucking stripe your ass it’s a cat of nine tails rightous indignation that’s a legion of decency oh my shit that’s like scarlet letter styles that’s like dragging that girl by the hair terrible humiliation nah! i don’t think [...]

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, “Broken, As in English” discusses, in her characteristically brilliant way (“All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages at every turn”) Phillips’ work as well as the fragments of Archilochus (“the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”), Heraclitus and Parmenides. It’s interesting to think about what the eraser’s attitude towards their text is. Jen Bervin’s beautiful Nets is a respectful erasure—she allows her erased poems to talk to the original Shakespeare sonnets because the poems are printed in grey and her selections are in boldface (or shyface). Someone [...]

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 that warrior cultures sprang up all over the earth–in Native American and steppe cultures, in just about all places where the horse or the wagon or superior roads allowed mobility. This includes the Christian cultures.The eternal equilibrium of warrior cultures can be distilled down to two terms: Arete (excellence, prowess, bravery, status) and Xenia (hopsitality, honesty in trade, alliances between strangers). Each of these two concepts can be further divided into three categories, two of which are of human agency, and the last of divine. In terms of Arete: Lowest form: mere brute strength and [...]

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 letting something which might not meet human definitions of living or which might not fit into a rigid binary of non-living and living but nevertheless to let those things live to let the ghosts of electricity live i do have an interest in what you might call the art of ghosts which is another way to say what the activity of the dorks at dorkbot is is that it’s the art of letting the ghosts speak for themselves - Nick Keys Ghosts of Technology - an excerpt dance is a skill speaking is a skill [...]

When you fell asleep with your fingerprint on the sensor I kept your hand warm. I kept my hand above the hand on your controller, and we scrolled through the menus together, punched your dream onto the screen. It was a first person shooter. You navigated through levels reserved for early adopters. Every portal glowing in the dark. Of course I’d never dream you’d cruise through rooms of memory. How you used to sleeptalk about the startup, in the morning beg me tell exactly what you’d said. A room filled with diamonds and enemies, the exit a sewer stacked with rubies and man-size rats. Aboveground, the circuits of the sky surge on. A figure on a bridge rimmed with gold coins, no railing, goes down. You muscle your way into a villa stocked with backstabbers and portraits of riches. I never recognize myself in any of the victims. __________________________________________________________ Elsbeth [...]

by Matthea Harvey, illustrated by Amy Jean Porter Of Lamb is the rare, special kind of book that is so beautiful one can’t help but keep it wrapped in tissue paper when they’re carrying around, as they might a shiny stone kept for luck. A collaboration between painter Amy Jean Porter and poet Matthea Harvey (Modern Life, Sad Little Breathing Machine), the book is an art object. Porter’s one hundred paintings become integral to Harvey’s sad, strange love story; they complete it, shading it with whimsy, irony and surrealism. It’s interesting to read Of Lamb beginning with the endnotes, where Harvey discusses the unique process of the book’s conception. Inspired by other erasures or appropriations of texts like Jen Bervin’s Nets, Harvey challenged herself to pick up the first book she could find and “erase” it. That book was David Cecil’s A Portrait of Charles Lamb, the story of well-regarded [...]

Great art and a true, living (not institutionalized) culture arise not from a series of snobs and gatekeepers, but from the inner necessity and desire of people to express the 7 kinds of affectual brain: play, courtship, grief, seeking, anger (outrage, scandal, impiety), caring (tenderness, friendship, affection, affinity), and fear. In terms of fear, grief, anger, and courtship, the mode of expression is often highly ceremonial as in the cults of sacrifice or festivity, and may be said to act as a form of catharsis (Aristotle/ Dionysian). This might be likened to a controlled burn. In terms of seeking, care, and play Plato’s concept of being ever nearer to the perfect or archetypal form prevails. In such a case, wit, self-consciousness, parody, pastiche, and intelligence are the order of the day, and this may be seen as Apollonian, but the two forms of affective expression overlap, especially where courtship admits [...]