July 2010
1 post
3 tags
Jack Spicer
A Poem Without a Single Bird in It (Jack Spicer, poetryfoundation.org)
What can I say to you, darling, When you ask me for help? I do not even know the future Or even what poetry We are going to write. Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people Than either of us have tried it. I loved you once but I do not know the future. I only know that I love strength in my friends And greatness And hate the way...
June 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Tasting blind
Joe said he likes to taste blind because it’s a challenge, and challenges are what make a person better. Lisa said, I thought you liked to taste blind for sport.
I like to taste blind for sport, Joe said, And then it was clear he’d been tasting-blind- for hours. Lisa slid the bottles to the middle of the table.
Joe clenched his eyelids. It’s not about the provenance or the...
May 2010
1 post
2 tags
Nick Lantz
Of the Parrat and other birds that can speake (Nick Lantz, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know)
“It is for certain knowne that they have died for very anger and griefe that they could not learn to pronounce some hard words.”—Pliny the Elder
When you buy the bird for your mother you hope it will talk to her. But weeks pass before it does anything except pluck the bars with...
3 tags
Marie Howe
After the movie (Marie Howe, poets.org)
My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie. He says that he believes a person can love someone and still be able to murder that person.
I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment. Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come to a day
when you’re forced to think “it’s him or...
March 2010
1 post
3 tags
More W.S.
A Message To Po Chu-I (W.S. Merwin, The New Yorker, 3/8/2010)
In that tenth winter of your exile the cold never letting go of you and your hunger aching inside you day and night while you heard the voices out of the starving mouths around you old ones and infants and animals those curtains of bones swaying on stilts and you heard the faint cries of the birds searching in the frozen mud for...
February 2010
1 post
Who is this Mo guy, anyway?
I thought the Vosges chocolate-bacon bar would be better in dark chocolate. No. It’s not. It still tastes like a horrible, horrible accident.
January 2010
7 posts
Why are you crying? →
Poetry about poetry
To the Blank Spaces (W. S. Merwin)
For longer than by now I can believe I assumed that you had nothing to do with each other I thought you had arrived
whenever that had been
more solitary than single snowflakes with no acquaintance or understanding running among you guiding your footsteps
somewhere ahead of me
in your own time oh white lakes on the maps that I copied and gaps on the...
Lupe Fiasco on writing
“Truthfully I have trouble with second verses ‘cause the first one be so intimidating. It be bullying and picking on it, instigating, pointing out all the second ones limitations. Like: You ain’t nothing but a imitation, like “Bits o’ Bacon.” Then he gets the chorus and the beats together then they all gang up on him and get to hating. But then, around the...
December 2009
12 posts
MAYAKOVSKY
mugwumpian:
I
My heart’s aflutter! I am standing in the bath tub crying. Mother, mother who am I? If he will just come back once and kiss me on the face his coarse hair brush my temple, it’s throbbing!
then I can put on my lcothes I guess, and walk the streets.
2
I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.
Words! Be sick as I am sick, swoon,...
1 tag
Bed/Breakfast
Bed Duane Street Hotel
Breakfast Upstairs at Bouley
.2 miles away from each other.
4 tags
Fuck the lardons, eat the tomato
I had daydreamed that my arrival in New York would go like this: Check into hotel. Walk across street to Bouchon Bakery. Order brioche and hot chocolate. Eat, with gloves on, in snowy Central Park.
Two things happened that changed that plan: First, I was starving—I ordered foccacia with zucchini, tomatoes and lardons instead. Second, it wasn’t snowing outside. It was pouring rain.
I...
2 tags
2 tags
From Poetry 12/09
True Love (Nate Klug, Poetry, 12/09)
Off rows of windshields in the Amtrak lot rain in sudden clumps like jacks. Parked cars with people in them awaiting people they imagine hurtling through suburbs of silver woods awaiting them. True love needs interference, a certain blizzard distance, for the words to worm through. Remember Iowa? August storms that would self-spark as if our fights could trip...
3 tags
I've been humming these songs all day. →
3 tags
Watch
It's probably a common mistake
Make note: Hay Fever is not Spring Fever. I thought I had Hay today but it’s really Spring. Though Spring doesn’t quite capture it either. But you know what I mean.
6 tags
Like plasma
Yesterday I went swimming for exercise. It’d been years. I thought to myself: No resistance. Nothing that I can strain my back doing, or hurt my leg.
The pool was empty. The room was warm but the water was cool. I eased into it, but then wondered what a real swimmer would do. I figured he would dunk himself. So that’s what I did. It was freezing.
I was in the water now. My arm hair...
4 tags
From Poetry 9/09:
If Nicholson Baker weren’t so sarcastic I might be clear on what he’s trying to say about rhymed poetry in The Anthologist. But he is, and so I’m not. Which leaves me to trust my own instinct, which is still in its infancy, but is informed by this Don Paterson poem, which I was really into—until I realized it rhymed. Now I’m into it a little less.
Why do you stay up...
This could be urgent
For the past 24 hours—ever since seeing a Tweet from a friend with a link in it—I’ve been cruising TheAwl.com. Like so many other things (The Rolling Stones; homoism), I’m late to the game with this one. So I’m playing catch up.
I think The Awl is good, and the reason I know I think this is because after reading some of its pieces I’ve experienced a familiar...
February 2009
6 posts
Cinnamon v. Cinnamon (rolls, that is)
The day I turned 30 the doctor put us both on a plane to Minneapolis, where we ate at a fish fry, stayed in that city’s swankiest hotel, ate gougère & fried mortadella sandwiches and, most importantly, ate this cinnamon roll:
January 2009
12 posts
