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mark leidner

Poem(s) of the Week: Mark Leidner

January 24, 2014 { 0 comments }

I first encountered Mark Leidner’s poems on in 2007. Those early poems struck me for how they treated absurd corners of cultural ephemera with the utmost seriousness, and in a vernacular language that seamlessly ascended to momentary heights of poetic beauty. And Leidner read them in an incredibly patient and affectless voice. The overall effect: hilarity and existential wonder.

Those poems matured into the material in Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me, often becoming more expansive. The first four poems below feel like an evolution in the opposite direction: Leidner distilled. So much complexity is achieved in the interplay of title and poem, where every word counts.

The last poem, “Little Children Riding Dogs,” calls back most to the early work in the wonderful flatness of lines like “also I had this idea” and in its insistence on proceeding with the syntactic “and then” drive of a child’s narrative. The poem is exactly as long as it needs to be (a simple compliment, but, I think, hard to achieve for many poets). Its scope and pacing are designed to give breathing room for its content, for Leidner is a poet who can’t help but linger on beauty, and he finds it in the most prosaic phrasings, the simplest ideas. And of course, by the end of the poem, the lingering itself becomes something beautiful to admire. The thought that we thought that thought to begin with. I recommend reading these poems to yourself in a slow, methodical fashion, 3 or 4 times. Don’t be surprised if they take residence in your skull.

Love

A cardboard sign
climbing through
thunder-

clouds
on the bumper
of a flying

car
that reads
‘tag applied for.’

Manuscript

Slain
love

breathing
dragons.

Human Nature

How large
how well
a perfume

that smelled
like wind
would look

blowing through
the hair
of suffragettes

would sell
looms.

Reading

Biting in-
to a mirror

plated apple.
Finding out

the apple is
mirror all

the way to the core.

Little Children Riding Dogs

I love the idea of children riding dogs so much
to think of how they’d dress them
I want to be a kid again
and ride my dog to elementary school Bucko!
Charley! Rex! Socrates!
and dismount at the school
and send the dog home
also I had this idea
if all the children rode their dogs to school
when they got there at dawn they’d tell their dogs sit
and the dogs would just sit there
all day in the sun
with the shadow of the flagpole like a clock
while inside the children learn
until the bell rings and they burst out of the school
and mount their dogs and ride them home
and some of them get home at dusk
that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever thought.

________________________________
Mark Leidner is the author of Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me (, 2011) and The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover (, 2011).

a brief and not recent internet roundup

February 20, 2010 { 0 comments }

so i was talking with adam and decided that i would start doing this. sooner or later these will consist of new work published in online journals i like, but i figured right now i would just put the links to a bunch of pieces up and say a few words about them

three by jack christian at
i like notnostrums and i like jack christian. what is notnostrums? it has something to do with and dara wier runs that. originally i wanted this up for the first poem, MARIE, and the way that it moves through names in a way that seems sort of appropriate for an online journal. we are not saying that this is a comment on scrolling through facebook in this day and age of the internet, but that there is a quality to the rapid succession of names that seems both contemporary and rooted in something that has always been there and always will. the other are pretty great too.

two by mark leidner at
i am a pretty big fan of mark leidner and THE RIVER may be one of my favorite things he’s ever done. i also like longer poems that build on themselves using repetition and variation and slowly begin to add up to something greater than the individual lines by folding backwards and forwards and revealing emotions you maybe thought wouldn’t happen in a poem called ROMANTIC COMEDIES that makes as many jokes as the poem makes and it makes a shit ton of jokes. it does.

one by kathryn regina at
i like this poem a lot. so much that i solicited for my run over at in . in addition, this poem is part of her greying ghost chapbook I AM IN THE AIR RIGHT NOW which is a series of linked poems involving a hot air balloon.

one by kristen orser again at
this poem was not originally a prose poem. but the editor made it one. i love prose poems and i love this poem and i am glad the editor did that. there is something about the density of it in prose that really excites me.

one by chelsea martin at
i probably should have ended it at the orser, but i like anaphora. a lot. and i eat at mcdonalds. and i am full of worry.
this reminds me a lot of chelsey minis’s A SPEECH ABOUT THE MOON [reproduced here from fence at ]. tao lin even wrote about both this poem and its relation to the other. he did. you can google that. i have faith in you. i do.

next week we will talk about internet chapbooks and also , which is awesome.

mark leidner

Poem(s) of the Week: Mark Leidner

a brief and not recent internet roundup

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