Psychoanalysis is a good system for those of us that like structure. Even the unconscious, that vast cauldron of libidinal dreams and desires, is structured like a language as Lacan reminds us. After all, there are but three psychical structures in psychoanalysis: the pervert, the psychotic, and the neurotic. I must admit that I find the psychotic the most interesting when considering the artist. It was after all James Joyce, the psychotic artist par excellence that gave Lacan the material to discover that, “the unconscious is the real”, an insight that foregrounded the symptom as both the source of knowledge and ultimately as that which defies interpretation, as it is always caught within the real.[1] But I don’t wish to look at Joyce. I’m interested in first looking more generally at the idea of the psychotic artist. If we take these structures seriously, we should pause to situate them as [...]

Three poets name their favorite books and poems from the 2011. b bearhart 1. Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (UAPress) edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke Indigenous Americas. Nuff said. (It’s a poet’s wet dream. Can I say that? Cause I just did.) 2. Mad for Meat (Salmon Poetry) by Kevin Simmonds This collection is honest and beautiful. No frills or tricks. Simply fantastic poems by a very talented human. 3. by Tarfia Faizullah Thank god for poet friends. So many people linked this poem on social networking sites. I love the way this poem builds through sound. 4. “The Blue Dress in Mother’s Closet” by Saeed Jones Who is this dude?! This poem is brilliant. Read it. 5. by Melissa Jones This poem is not like my other picks. Or maybe it is and I’m not getting the connection. I like the jarring nature of this poem. It [...]

December 22, 2011 Mother was never prepared for Christmas. We would drive around in the old car on Christmas eve looking for a tree. Most of the tree lots would be empty or closed. But finally, beside some gas station, in the dark, a sign would loom, “TREES” and a light would be on. “There’s one! Stop! See? I see a tree…Mother, pull over!” one of my sisters would say. We would all run over to the last straggly tree, pay for it, stuff it in the backseat with me, and head home back to whatever apartment or house we were in that year. Mother would have done all her Christmas shopping earlier that day or maybe the day before, and would stay up all night wrapping and trimming the tree. She never remembered to buy Scotch tape or wrapping paper though, so our presents were often wrapped in newspaper [...]

Who to Tell Who to tell no one cares when no one cares No one takes the time to care for a monster I care for monsters But only because I am one I go in the dark house With the ghosts And the ghosts take my coat off The junkies The other man sits slumped in the chair Is he dead yet? I do not know I know that no one cares about anything I do know that the dressing room Is drab and grey And my pink patterned dress Looks ridiculous against something so truthful Wildness is not sadness The wilderness is not sad It is naked I am not If only because Decomposition is Not nudity Who to tell this? Who do I tell when no one cares I did not expect them to I did not expect them to care I am not mad I’m not [...]

What I love about Paul K. Tunis’s work is how brilliantly he melds traditional comic-book style with the experimental. “Toddlers & Tiaras & Vermin” uses three elements I find very interesting when creating a poetry comic: the poem itself, dialogue, and interpretive image (the latter as it differs slightly from the literal text of the poem). It works so well as a poetry comic because we see an absurd, strange elucidation of the poem through the images. However, Tunis never forces too much on the reader; there is always the sense that the images are only part of the story, and it creates a separate component. There’s mysteriousness in the image/text information given, allowing the reader space to create meaning on their own–what great poetry does. The poetry comic is straight forward, the arc, as seen through the images, eloquently executed, with the elements of the humorously (tragically) grotesque. Be [...]

We can simplify imagery by saying it is that aspect of writing which appeals to the five senses; but that would be incorrect without the qualifier “sensual.” If we want to be more expansive, but not make the term entirely meaningless (and definitions that insist imagery is anything evoked by words are meaningless) we can use the following qualifiers: 1. Sensual imagery: any evocation of the senses–tactile, auditory, visual, aural, and olfactory in their strict sense as descriptive 2. Intuitive imagery: images that seem scattered and incongruous, non-linear, and perhaps surreal that travel somewhere between concrete detail and abstractions or fantastical combinations of things, places, concepts, things 3. Kinetic imagery: any word or group of words evoking action 4. Abstract or conceptual imagery: forms of synecdoche, metonymy, figurative speech, sensual imagery used to evoke ideas to which one of the five senses or kinesis still clings in ghostly form 5. [...]

River 2 They thought themselves too much Acquainted with their seasonal Removal from the wet industry, Or rather placed beside it, Two picnickers blessed by them And losing the thought carefully Like a scientist in the river sent To be their blind guest As the center keeps forming Only to the situation That knows it and to no other Abstraction suggesting, “Things have gotten Too soon.” All things should be Sent back—except the hawks— Without us to the city. __________________________________________ Paul Legault is the author of The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010), The Other Poems (Fence, 2011) and The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s, forthcoming). He is co-editor of the translation journal, Telephone, and he works at the Academy of American Poets. PHOTO CREDIT: Lawrence Schwartzwald Related Posts Poem of the Week: Sharon Olds Poem of the Week: Adam Tessier Poem of the Week: Saeed Jones Poem of the Week: Christopher Stackhouse [...]

Warning: mUutations are a project from my other site, . They are arbitrary interpretive readings that change the poems into something they’re not. Proceed at your own risk. The Dog in the Garage The dog in the garage, The hound that wanders around Snapping at flies, with an infected ear — Suddenly starts to run Across the street at an angle. He must have remembered something Mixed with the odors of dust And car-grease — a delirious Fragrance of sexual life. I just started reading Kayak—the poetry magazine George Hitchcock ran almost single-handedly from 1964-84. It’s a wonderful zine brought to life with Hitchcock’s visual collages. The magazine serves as a portal into the surrealist and deep image poetry of the period. Andrew Joron cites it as “the most sustained, and most visible, interact between deep-image and surrealist poetry.” This is good and bad, however, since deep imagism, for many, [...]

A On my entire obscene face there is something I’m trying to achieve. It is colorless. It is self-published. It is inner fatigue. It is so superfluous! It is part of an addiction I hate and depend on. It naturally enters into conversations. It will induce a kind of slow intuition. It will be sloppy and corrugated. It will smell pleasant. It will be animals playing on a farm. It will be completely alone. It will not be so bad. It will be missing out. It will have a vague sense of relief. It will be committing without action. It will be floating on the surface of everything. It will be an amorphous tedium. It will be sleep. It will be a party. It will be a good lunch and supper. It will be a whole day and night. It will be an indefinite field full of universal life. It [...]

Certain sections of broca’s area of the brain are involved both in how words are given syntactical order and how gestures, physical movements are interpreted as flow, as arc, as coherent actions. We know that broca lights up like a pin ball machine when shadow puppets are introduced before the eye. My theory of narrative is that it is arc, gesture, syntactical force the most common of which is what we call a story, but not exclusive to story. We have difficulty seeing narrative as lyrical because it seems more “rule” bound than what we consider lyrical–thus, my students tendency to resist turning their gerunds and participles into active verbs, as if adding “ing” to the verb kept the language safe from being overdetermined and definite. This use of gerunds and participles creates a lot of syntactic ambiguity and I think the brain recognizes this as somehow more “lyrical” because [...]

Pissing What part of life is in the weirdness spreading illimitably around what fits? At face level, as he stood there, glaucous light was caught in the clear plastic shower curtain. This light came from the sun by an obscure but direct path through the airshaft. Look at it! The body of the slender man slouched forward like a bow. And his hand pinched his cock over the trouser notch. He hadn’t turned the light on, because, of course, he knew where the gleam-smudge of the commode cupped its shadowed pool. What a limp arrow and what an idle, slouching cupid! Whom does he hope to transpierce? He touched the plummeting fireflies of urine with his gaze and with thought. Would he ever choose to pass this moment if this were heaven where every action flows in simple purposefulness from desire? However absurd and embarrassing, he thought of love. All [...]

Tinsel Tinsel for M.C. A fool for love, an inner refugee, sees a peacock strutting in the birdhouse high on a branch and fanning the broadest, most articulated fan tail the fool for love has ever seen. “Come fly with me!” the fool calls to the peacock, but the bright bird keeps strutting up and down above the fool for love there on the ground. A blackbird comes and settles on his shoulder. His pecks are rough caresses as he asks him, “Why do you keep staring at that tree?” “Peacock!” the fool for love cries, but the blackbird caws back, “Fool! Since when do peacocks fly? Look around the birdhouse: see us towhees, wrens and jays and blackbirds flittering and swooping— what we always do for free.” All the fool can do is stare. His neck is permanently out of whack; he doesn’t care. But one fine day in [...]

The retrospective sayings of the mystic become the regurgitated maxims of the pedant. The mystical experience is ineffable, by definition, and yet mystics are invariably compelled to write. What the mystic writes after the fact is not meant to be systematic, comprehensive, or even an accurate representation of his mysticism. But leave it to the gate keepers to ruin the words of another. Pendants pilfer from the mystic’s coffers and reduce those marvelous and contradictory emotions to dogmatic maxims. A verbal articulation of an entirely non-verbal experience necessarily falls short. What pedants do to the mystic, they also do to the poet. In both cases, clinging to footnotes, journals, and excessive psychoanalysis, the original experience (mystic or poetic) is concealed within a labyrinth of pseudo-intellectual criticism. An excellent poem appears simple in its complexity, and above all easy in its difficulty. A poem appearing strained or artificial (though it is [...]

The last installment of this month’s Poem of the Week is a special one: three poems by Paul Violi—poems originally published in his first full-length collection In Baltic Circles by Kulchur Foundation in 1973 and . When choosing poems these last three weeks, I had Paul in mind, and it wasn’t hard to cull from the multitudes of former Paul Violi students whose work (and lives) have been influenced by him. I could fill a whole year of Poem[s] of the Week with Violi-inspired verse. Which isn’t to say Paul encouraged his students to imitate his style (you can’t ape wit, charm, and unrelenting curiosity) nor that he had a heavy hand when editing his students’ poems (on the contrary, he knew just how to nudge you in the right direction—your direction). Before Paul passed away suddenly in April 2011 of pancreatic cancer, he was working on the reissue of [...]

I can never hate the Susquehanna, not if it took my last dollar, not if it made me look like a grade z version of some extra who got lost on his lunch break from a remake of The Grapes of Wrath and ended up standing poised against the wrong unforgiving sky. I spent my whole summer fishing, swimming, or mostly just watching the Susquehanna flow by, learned all its browns, and blacks, and greens, and those rare days when it was teal. I took the biggest brown bullhead I’ve ever laid eyes on out of this river, and a blue gill over a pound, and carp over 30. I watched the latterns of John boats pass in the dark and smelled the ghost of my father standing next to me, his old pack of chesterfield kings rolled up in his t shirt, smoke rising from his fresh lit cig, [...]