Reading Goat In The Snow Emily Pettit’s lush lines unfold and unfold and unfold. She’s a master of the short line, gorgeously complex in her use of dark themes (strongest being a version of intense human anxiety) and poignantly reveals these themes in an unselfconscious, direct voice. The distinctive “leaping” I find in so much great poetry of our generation (the feeling of non-sequitur logic and negative space between lines), is conquered by Pettit. But what’s so powerful about her poems is that she never loses the initial thread which allows each poem to remain entirely distinctive and unique, rather then forgoing sense. Each individual poem, like a planet in a solar system, orbits; sometimes harkening back to others nearby. Her poems are introverted planets, with extroverted survival skills, in a chaotic universe. * No one, I think, is quite as masterful at titles as Emily Pettit. In her book [...]
Bianca Stone
Things Warren loves: ______________________________________________ Warren Craghead III lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA with his wife and two daughters. See more at .
Related Linkage _____________________________________________________________ Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), winner the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A former Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she’s currently a doctoral candidate and King/Chávez/Parks Fellow at Western Michigan University. Eryn Cruft lives in Bloomington, IN but will soon be leaving for London to study for a Master’s degree in Language and Cognition at King’s College. Previous collaborations with Traci Brimhall have appeared in Guernica and Nashville Review. Eryn has also contributed work to the Undergraduate Journal of Cognitive Science.
(an excerpt from ‘Comics Poetry: Beyond Sequential Boundaries’) Can one see, indeed, that a painter or a poet never starts a painting or a poem before they have been carried to see it more or less by their spirit, in its simultaneity of principle elements…? ~ Rodolphe Töpffer, Réflexions et menus propos d’un peintre genevois Finding connections between comics and poetry has been my focus for a few years now. It’s an interest shared with a field of talented creators including Matt Madden, Warren Craghead, Bianca Stone, Paul K. Tunis, Alexander Rothman, Derik Badman, Summer Browning, Michael Farrell, Eryon Franklin, Franklin Einspruch and Julie Delporte, to name too few. Given this growing commitment to comics and poetry, (evident in recent , , and ), this article discusses comics theory, its relevance to experimental forms and possibilities for the future of comics poetry. Existing comics research often borrows concepts from narrative [...]
The People of Distress Going through a box of old ephemerae I found a tiny notebook called The People of Distress. The day I found the notebook was the day I started reading up on the gnostic gospels late at night in Vermont, stoned, the laundry rinsed by the thunderstorm, its slow musk behind our ears and inside our wrists. I’m not sure, but I suspect we have all been given the secret kingdom of God. Taking VHS into the shadowy back bedroom; Gesturing to blackflies and moths banging at the windows that we are mighty and merciless— this is how I sit, a box of old papers between my knees, a warrior beyond death. Nothing comes to us. We work with what is already here. We live at the garrison tinfoiling over half-eaten peaches while out in the world there are those who believe Jesus never kissed Mary Magdalene [...]
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 put a miniature rosebush in the ground each year to counteract my squalor. Don’t tell me that definition of madness, doing the same thing over again etcetera. The definition of madness is a certain enthusiasm, then there has to be another person there to not share in it—who is oppressed by it who can only stare into it. Tell it to the bluebird rustling over my head. Tell it to a satellite orbiting in its delusion of being a moon. I’m coaxing the black bull out of my mouth with a red flag and a [...]
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 .
*** *** *** Michael Rae’s suggested links 1. 2. The . Michael has served as his tattoo guinea pig for a decade. 3. . 4. Contemporary American folk art: . 5. . 6. . 7. . 8. 9. _______________________________________________________________ “People Thoughts” is an ongoing drawing/writing series by Michael Rae that began in 2009 and now features over four hundred pieces. In addition to illustration and writing, Michael produces pop music under the moniker “Freak Week.” He is from New Mexico and lives in Brooklyn. He loves sports. You can find many more of his creations .
_____________________________________________________________________ Jono Tosch is a poet, artist, non-fiction writer and fermentation enthusiast who lives in Northampton, MA. Last summer he took his blog, Oilchanges: the anti food blog food blog, to New Mexico on a reader-supported X-Country road trip. You can find his poems and whatnot by googling his name.
Utah Did you fathom the distractions it takes to wash down grass when rain becomes solid and wasteful? Here you are the insistence of an object when that object takes me to your ocean. I want to know the 1912 about the way you dress your socks on winter nights when pigeons dare to roam the streets. I want to recite the loveboat sermon with you, wielding through corridors, finding objects to place in picture frames. You said, “Let’s defy gravity over there.” I sailed to Utah that day. Throwing cups at the circumference of your name. ______________________________________________ Alina Gregorian’s poems have been published in Boston Review, GlitterPony, H_NGM_N, and other journals. She co-edits the collaboration journal Bridge.
Words to Oneself What I have heard here among endless shifting sights the air invisibly bright blinds recognition words carried silently by the will of it caught in colorful petals. Their scent is a thousand years, appearing and disappearing without a present. I have never really seen anything. Eyes bathed within a massive song, overtaken, submerged, deepening away, less than a dream’s weight. The body without horizon, and exhaustion pouring out into space deflated of purpose. You hold the watcher in your arms speak the tongue of patient endings. Singing, in a way, to your separated dreaming brother here listening in the dark. Holding his net into the air. _________________________________________________ Walter Stone is a poet and musician. He lives in Portland, OR.
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 [...]
The second line of Ben Fama’s chapbook New Waves, (Minutes Books 2011), is “All I want is my life/ to matter somehow.” And it seems that this book sets out to execute that statement despite the line’s futility. I say this with sincerity since it’s an important aspect of the human condition (especially for writers) but remains an ungraspable, continuous pursuit. In short, this is a book composed with clear-minded longing. The cultural awareness is unpretentious, the feeling is real, and the structures are solid. There’s been a post about Ben Fama’s poetry brooding in me since his last chapbook, Aquarius Rising, came out from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2010, and that’s because his poetry sticks with me. The word “hipster” has been thrown around a bit in reviews, but I find the term superfluous and dismissing. The difference between Ben Fama’s poems and many of his so-called hipster contemporaries [...]