Moon burnt up in a tree limb's wobble. Heaven's sort of nimble. Not to want the origin of light, to want its myth. To want the stroke across the jaw without the fist.
The human brain seems hardwired, no matter what, for pattern recognition and for metaphor making. All good poetry is actively engaged in the latter. All good concrete poetry actively engages both.
a poetry far beyond paraphrase, a poetry of direct presentation--the word, not words, words, words or expressionistic squiggles...reminiscent of permutational poems of the cabalists, the anagrams of the early Christian monks, the carmina figurata of the G
By using nothing but the figure/ground relationships of letters, engaging and powerful pieces are built up through a process that is less reminiscent of collage than it is of burnishing, worrying, plying, or even kneading.
...immediately apprehended in the way a road sign or...a navigational icon is. Slipping in under the threshold of awareness, the twisting scalpel of subverted meaning can strike that much deeper...
His house had cracked vinyl siding, cobwebbed windowsills, and blind mammals nesting in the chimney. There was a continual scent of expired milk and a trigger-happy answering machine with messages leftover from the college years.
Whoever kissed time on its exhausted crown With filial tenderness will then Remember how time lay down to sleep In the grain snowdrift past the window.
world in the words of the os, an ode, unspoken, hole in its infancy, uncuretted, sealed, not yet yielded, nulliparous mouth, girdle against growth, inland orifice, capital O, pore, aperture to the aleph, within which all, the overstocked pond...
Boundaries. Water / and singing stones, day world to night world...the waves' incantation, over and over, runnel / to ascent and crest, the torn lace of collapse. /The singing stones, the night the bandaged ward / shut down, morphine swaddles her riddled
We could shut the door / on this vertigo, but Mother when we / come to ourselves our feet skim the tiles./ Spoons shine on the table, and Mother, / we're dancing. I'm mouthing the words / to a song I never knew...
From “Suite for Emily:” “...doors you (I?) might fall through to the underworld / of bars and bus stations, private rooms of / dancing girls numb-sick & cursing the wilderness / of men’s round blank faces. Spinning demons.”
I have always loved these moments of delicate transition: walking alone in a borrowed house to a slim meridian of dawn barring the pillow before the cool breeze, a curtain of rain on the iron steps, rain laving lawn chairs arranged for a conversation fini
I could never face anything / without the wig. Transformed, the old vaudeville desire / struts & kicks its satiny legs, the desire to be / consumed by ruined marquees, these last drifting hotels, / to be riven, served up singing, arched & prismed / from a
So far, have managed, Not Much. So far, a few fractures, a few factions, a Few Friends. So far, a husband, a husbandry, Nothing Too complex, so far, followed the Simple Instructions.
pilgrim, i did not mean to be so loose / of tongue, so bold in all i loosely told / in my smut so smug, so overly sold./ i did not mean, pilgrim, to traduce. // ...poet, though you have the right to scold / it was highsouled you who made my mouth hold / w
Lynda Hull in her short life (1954-1994) wrote memorable poems, distinctive for their flamboyant shadows, a created world where pathos always has some swagger of the doomed: a quality that you might call (depending on your decade) Goth, punk, noir or maud
Conference room, blah blah blanket walls dissolve / and flow, a plunge in frigid water, blah blah / beat of branches warms your tingling frozen flesh, / incorporated world between two walls of ice, / ha ha horses’ heads on shivering human bodies, / da
Among poets there are probably higher than average rates of clutch burnout, job turnover, rooting about, sleep apnea, noncompliance, nervous leg syndrome, depression, litigation, black clothing, and so forth, but this is where we live...C D Wright, Coolin
Now, THIS is what I've been looking for in a poetry blog (or in any writing on poetry). Absolutely compelling, both in terms of selections and criticism; so spunky and smart, I enjoy every bit, including the sour, "rhubarby" flavors...
The man who was to fall to earth in four years' time still floated in his cloud of silvered fame...He'd been a Kon-Rad, King Bee, Manish Boy, a Lower Third. He'd be a thin white duke. He'd be a Christ, an alien, he'd be a dance club king.
The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze at the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
Touchon's works are constructed from distressed street posters that have been carefully edited...almost become recognizable letters or perhaps proposals for a new poetic alphabet but always slip back into forms and spaces...
Never before such a distant season of derision. Across town, the silo siren heralds an encore to panic. The lake below Mexico City shivers like a Plexiglas dance floor.
This feature begins with questions of fidelity: how close should the poet remain to his or her source text? What does it matter? Other contributors ask more technical questions, how to translate names, what to make of computer-generated translations, how