This entry is part of a series, Clubs and Societies» I’ve never really known how to write about other people without imposing some kind of “treatment” on them. And I guess it’s not possible to completely avoid imposing a “treatment” – but there are “treatments”, and then there are treatments. I discovered a poem called ‘Holocaust’ by an Objectivist poet called Reznikoff which was composed entirely out of cut-and-pasted transcripts from Holocaust survivors. Reznikoff’s artistic practice is one of selection – not invention. Or rather, invention through various selective combinations – sans commentary or explanation. And really, even when I’m writing from my own life, that’s what I’m doing. Transcribing the way I see the world is easy – what’s hard is knowing what shape what I see should take. So I’ve been building my Wayside Renga by transcribing conversations I’ve been having with five different regulars at Wayside from [...]

This entry is part of a series, Clubs and Societies» NOTE: Read about THEthe’s collaboration with the Red Room Company here. Across Australia, each state, city, suburb and street autonomously divides itself into thousands of clubs and societies. Sport, politics, art, craft, collectors: people gather voluntarily, outside the confines of their immediate geography, social class or profession. They gather around a shared passion. As such, clubs and societies are sites of sharing: sharing of knowledge, stories, skills and resources. Within these shared circles, language takes on a special role. Since members don’t have to articulate themselves for a general audience, vernacular becomes increasingly specialised. Often the assumed knowledge that lies within any given statement is so huge that, to an outsider, conversation at a club meeting would seem like a foreign language. For poetry, these distinctive argots provide fertile fields for experimentation, since every unique language has the potential to [...]

FOR IBRAHIM QASHOUSH They found you like a river stone in the Orontes where the people fished you out. And like oil on water you take the tint of all colors. Now a streetwise nation wakes, thousands on the Brooklyn Bridge, down Broadway, Cleveland, L.A., on the lawn of the Capitol jailbreaking our jobs and mountains, our houses foreclosing or falling down. There’s no due process to undo a quarter-century of bankers clapping the beat of a pop tune, people lost to a blindfold of interest. Listen. They’re singing your song in the square, old and young, a voice wading out where the cameras can see. ____________________________________________ Laren McClung is the author of Between Here and Monkey Mountain (Sheep Meadow 2012). She lives between two cities. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Walter Stone Poem of the Week: Geoffrey G. O’Brien Poem of the Week: Luke Johnson Poem of the [...]

Resources?: 1.: THE SEXIEST CREATIVE GENIUS IN HUMAN HISTORY 2. : an academically rigourous archive of curated .gifs&such from the 90s. 3. : Julia Panek’s TV-poetry-for-an-internet-age. 4. : a technically limitless archive of free, rare, university-press-and-such .pdfs. 5. : an amazing resource for strange high-res scans of “found” images–with a hub in Southern Brooklyn, run by Andrew Beccone+. 6. entire run. 7. ___________________________________________________________________ Paul Legault is the co-founder of the translation press Telephone Books and the author of three books of poetry: The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010), The Other Poems (Fence, 2011), and The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s, 2012). He’s .

from (Opera) Asylum 1. ______Here is the proof, ____________everything about me. I couldn’t stop thinking ___________about myself as him, so the revelatory parts of me _____like confetti undropped grew dusty and apologetic. “It isn’t enough _____to tell you any more.” ____________* _____“I’d like to think myself _____a generation who stayed married.” Back here, while walking past the foreign languages, my daily discussion with the parrot behind me, _____above all I am unaware who is trying to help. ____________* _____Given an infinity to write this, ___________you might. On courage: so much is trial and error. _____To adapt though, to take the raw materials _____of predestination and refine to a convenient last name. _____Once, my father _____said something accidentally better than any he ever thought. ____________* _____The closest I get to being alone an unanswered phone, _____the showers even crowded. _____Nancy the butcherbird changes _____the sheets and rallies discrete with nicknames and [...]

, 2012 We lie in every word. Did I say word? Oh dear. I meant mode. We lie in every mode. Darcie Dennigan, “The Ninth Annual Meeting of the Fraternal Disorder of Historic Linguists or The Error of My Maze” Darcie Dennigan announces in Madame X, her second collection of poetry, that we have been “wis-hearing” syllables “since the Tower of Babel’s ceiling fan stirred M and W into topsiturvitude.” In “Some Antics” we find the speaker “at Macy’s searching for an honest clause.” We are told: “When the honest word eludes, try to substitute.” Finally, at the end of the book, Dennigan acknowledges her readers: “If anything emerges from this book’s mistakes, it is thanks to [their] generous readings.” Mistakes run rampant through Madame X. As large-scale disasters they are droughts and hurricanes, nuclear holocaust and water contamination. But mistakes also arise as verbal collisions, as a misunderstanding or [...]

I grew up in a neighborhood where most of the parents worked in factories or trades. The closest anyone came to a professional occupation was Ann Boyle next door who worked as an executive secretary for Bell telephone and, through the great benefits of that monopoly, was able to retire at age 55. Anne never married, but she had companions and an ample glass of scotch at the ready on the front porch. She lived with her mother and brother, did not have to pay rent, and became rich through stocks. She was my first “student” in so far as I helped her write papers when she decided to return to school and procure a college degree. I can still remember getting slowly sloshed on scotch while helping her structure a ten page paper on Martin Luther King. Anyway, professionalism which I see as a way of life, almost a [...]

Crude H2 its smothered O circling for sense there is none three-eyed or blind delirious with repair eventually or now _________________________________________________ Kevin Simmonds is a San Francisco-based writer, musician and filmmaker originally from New Orleans. His writing has appeared in jubilat, Kyoto Journal, Massachusetts Review and Poetry. His books include the poetry collection Mad for Meat and two edited works: the poetry anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality and the late poet Carrie Allen McCray’s Ota Benga under My Mother’s Roof. He wrote the music for the Emmy Award-winning documentary Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica and Voice. Share this: Related Posts Poem of the Week: Daniel Nathan Terry Collective Brightness Poem of the Week: Luke Johnson On Poets and Speakers Poem of the Week: Kevin Shea

Brian: My favorite aspect of your novel, one that other “Armageddon” narratives mostly miss, is that the sky may fall, but still nothing is more terrifying than one’s own death (or even one’s own life). I guess this is a statement posing as a question. Colin: I like this. Thanks, Brian. Brian: A writer friend and I debate over concept v. character. I don’t consider your book to be a “postmodernist rewrite.” But some might. Did you envision this book in that light? To what extent do you see yourself as an “experimental” writer? Colin: I don’t view it as a rewrite so much as an interpretation, and a loose one at that. Obviously I pick and choose which elements from the Book of Revelation I’m interested in working with. I set down a frame on a particular section of a particular translation and worked with those elements. I’m working [...]

“Formal choices are never without ideological implications.” Marjorie Perloff From the title on of Jennifer Karmin’s “aaaaaaaaaaalice” (Flim Forum Press, 2010), we are falling—crowning though sentiment and buckshot language splayed across pages. “aaaaaaaaaaalice” is a book grappling to hold on to meaning in the self-fomenting chasm that is our condition. In this way, sentience is a pain. The book oscillates, like its speaker, between a traveller’s snapshots of exotica and an authorial responsibility to the readers’ experience with a crafted effect. In the tatters and wobble between sign and signified, the book struggles to make sense of the phenomena of experience. The book may be a performance score toward a diaristic and playful childlike freedom or it may be a series of exercises pulsing between apophantic closure and menu aperture. Because I cannot read Jennifer Karmin’s “aaaaaaaaaaalice” for you, I want to insist on one thing: I want to insist [...]

The following is from a series of Pi Poems, or Cadae—the alphabetical equivalent of the first five digits of Pi (3.1415). Pi is a transcendental number that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter approximately equal to 3.1415926535897. In poetry, it has been used as the basis for a syllabic form that obeys the following distribution of syllables and stanza lengths, resulting (by line length) in a kind of sonnet: xxx __________(3) x ____________(1)___________ } 3 xxxx _________(4) x ____________(1)___________ } 1 xxxxx ________(5) xxxxxxxxx ____(9) xx ___________(2)___________ } 4 xxxxxx _______(6) xxxxx ________(5)___________ } 1 xxx __________(3) xxxxx ________(5) xxxxxxxx _____(8)___________ } 5 xxxxxxxxx ____(9) xxxxxxx ______(7) from Cadae: The Pi Poems 1 The music stopped for a moment then— when we began to savor in its absence silence— started again, maybe a bit louder than before or maybe we only heard it as such, a [...]

The seven sections of Colin Winnette’s slim new novel Revelation correspond to the seven angels of the Book of Revelation. They bring with them fire, hail, receding oceans, bitter water, falling stars (and bodies, in a chilling moment), darkness, locusts, sinkholes, and, of course, those pesky horsemen. The seven sections also depict seven stages of the life of Marcus, whose love and despair we encounter intimately. These biblical calamities, very subtly rendered in unique and memorable visages, are backdrops to Marcus’ struggle, a reminder that life’s great apocalypse – its end – is always an intensely personal one. I had a chance to speak with Winnette about his work on this novel, his other projects, and the writing life. Brian: Can you talk a little about your development? What authors and styles have shaped you? How has attending a program changed your outlook (or not)? Colin: Influence is a tricky [...]

Assumption, The Climb, the Premise, the— What drama _____of the size of signs, of sighs Seized at zero. A dry soul is best _____because combustible— But to stand _____beyond witness, burying the sun _____or else writing fire _____along a circumference of unclosing —this is my faith & my reason. I enter history As a secret agent or stone effigy _____dedicated to communism _____but eaten away by music. My chorus _____vacuum-crowded, I _____beg to begin— If now _____is a precipice, then A human voice predates the universe. Everything sends, never to receive This message Premonitory to a shriek—of Shredded _____immensité the vocable, irrevocable _____Proof. _____________________________________________________ Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010) and translator of the German fantasy writer Paul Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine (Wakefield Press, 2011). Joron lives in Berkeley, California, and plays the theremin in the dark ambient quartet Cloud [...]

THEthe Poetry and are teaming up to share poems across the oceans. This collaboration introduces new audiences to the works of emerging and established poets from America and Australia. Weekly installments of poems, interviews and artworks will celebrate poetic observations from Brooklyn to Sydney and places between. The Red Room Company is a not-for-profit poetry organisation founded in 2003 and based in Sydney. Their mission is to provide professional commission opportunities to contemporary Australian poets, particularly emerging voices. They present poetry to the wider community in engaging, unusual ways involving film, audio and installation. Since 2007, The Red Room Company has delivered Papercuts, their national poetry education program for primary and secondary schools. In 2010 the poetry education program was extended to Correctional Centres. Related Posts On Gene Tanta’s “Critical Introduction to Unusual Woods.” Why Poetic Collaboration Matters And the James Patterson of Contemporary Poetry is… THEthe Poetry: 2010 Year [...]

This entry is part of a series, Garbage Picking in The Waste Land» Still, the close reading. Fine. You will have your blasted close reading. However, I will conduct this reading on my own terms. I will shuffle, and play the cards at my whim, sometimes to my detriment. First though, a word on why and how I’ve resisted the close reading. “The Waste Land” begs a different criticism. My initial interest in the poem sprung from the seeming impossibility for anything clever to be said about the poem, and yet everyone went on assigning it, sometimes with a tone of reverence normally associated with religiosity: “You don’t get it? None of us do, it’s a mystery! Work toward it though, it has its rewards!” That Eliot can be enjoyed without thorough understanding is entirely true. The danger, of course, is that Eliot may or may not be part of [...]