[Oops, not sure what happened but the post posted prior to arrival at an "end"]...Anyways I'm very pro Petrarch.  The JG piece reminds me some of H Mullen which I very much dig, and I also think R Silliman except I think that's not something other than a hazy thought--likely just a matter of seeing largish chunks of prosepoem.  I need to get back into The Alphabet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I like how the pieces are I guess one could say kaleidoscopic and also loosely narrative/faux diaristic.  Mostly, and this gets strayt back to HM, I love how the text majorly seems generated by puns and other play.  It's hard to believe it was written "with a hardon."  MM, or maybe it's got some of the semenic drive A Burgess says narrative needs--I might be making up the AB paraphrase; wow I feel like so much of my "knowledge" is that which I've made up rather than verified.

I like this--from Typo 4: JOHANNES GÖRANSSON

My only quip is the Petrarch digs--poor Petrarch, has he had any friendly words ever since Pound decided a smackdown was necessary?  I presumably exagerate, but only to express my very pro

Art-trash

On Chelsey Minnis and CAConrad

Joyelle McSweeney

I have only actually read the CM part of the review, and skimmed the second part, but I overall rather enjoy what I have actually read: so few reviews "close read" enough for my taste so it's nice to see it when it occurs.  I particularly dig JM's point that the punctuation of Minnis misses the mark: so punny/clever/fun/pleasing.

I Love Discursing With Women

I also notice I tend to fare better when Montevidayo is in its populated by women stages--the blog is multiauthor and of course the roster for the blogcommentbox has regulars but of course some regulars go on hiatuses)--and I don't know if this is solely a quirk of mine or if--as some of me suspects--smart women are inevitably gonna make for the best discursive atmosphere: I guess I'm working from the assumption that (and again this is from my own experience and that sample is too small for macro-conclusions) it seems (can seem and the word assumption seam?) women may be less likely to display an aura of dismissiveness--or at-least the Montevidayo women.  And this ain't to say I've never seen women dismiss at this site, but even the dismisiveness tends towards engagement.

Note: although I erased it, initially I posited this may link to overall trends in female socialization; and this does not make me comfortable as I lean towards thinking much female socialization is awful/damaging.

Note: I don't mean to imply I am pro conversations with women because of some general or innate docility: no-no-no, not-at-all!  It's precisely for the fact of multifoliate arguing that I often find my arguments--or conversations or discursive xchanges or whathaveyou--so delightful and impressive.  For those who want names, Danielle Pafunda and Ariel Greenburg and Kate Zambreno and Kate Durbin (apologies if I've botched spellings) come to mind.

Ugh, I need to wean myself off Montevidayo--the blog not the city.  I keep non meaning to do this and then keep on failing.  And this makes sense in many ways; although it's by leaps and bounds more stressful to participate in than, for example, The French Exit or Nothing To Say and Saying It, it's also full of lovely sparks and has been great for the poetry writing me: I could be wrong--influence can be difficult to pin down--but I believe that many poems of my past year would not have been written were it not for my Montevidayo exposure.  I assume this is why I continually fail to cut the cord: the cord stresses but also feeds much nutrition.

A Lovely Surprise

I searched me on the internet and found this amazingly kind response to some poems of mine (here's the link: 21stcenturypoetrybychris.blogspot.com);
Tuesday, March 16, 2010


What to do now?

My favorite artist in FENCE was Adam Strauss and I looked up his work. Unfortunately, FENCE is his second publishing and I could not find much about the author. I found this bio on Softblow.com: " Adam Strauss lives in las Vegas, Nevada. He has poems out

in the current Drunken Boat, as well as forthcoming in Fence. "


I also read a few of the poems that were on this web page and this was my favorite:

Lust


Blood thinks.

Streams sings.

Rubies' regal reddenings.



Logicians think.

Singers sing.

Painters paint ravishing reddenings.



Glasses clink in an act of relief.

A philosopher falls in love with a painter's way with paint.

Blood sauce more warming than sable regals.



Writing heightens sensation presently.

We shouldn't necessarily all be writing.

It is fun doing a bad job it’s good to be doing fun.



Running a sentence on extends its sense or I'm wrong.

It is a big deal but not now.

Something else is present I'll love it later.



I've long been doing in love so I’m interested in doing lust.

I want lust to wake up at dawn and place a rose on my chest.

I hope he smells like bacon and cinnamon singing country music. "


I believe that Strauss is homosexual and that many of his poems that I have read show this. However, I found it interesting in the above poem that the only illusion to this is the word "he" in the final line. It seems strange that he would put so little attention to it because in other poems such as one named " Gay" it seems so apparent.

Posted by Chris Hernandez at 6:52 PM 0 comments On the Fence about "Fence"

As I began reading "FENCE" I was perplexed by by the abstract and absurd nature of many of the poems. They seemed to be far above my comprehension level and seemed too unique to fit into many of the previous poetry categories I have read. However, as I began to slow down and study each poem I began to appreciate the writing more. I searched for flow between poems and was unable to find any. I wanted to find out if the editors had chosen poems that flowed together or portrayed some overall message. I definitely realized some social commentary, as seen in "OverPass" by Adam Strauss. Sometimes it is apparent, as seen in Strauss' work: "Because this/ Is Los Angeles---/ Home of the world's/ Most glamorous feminism." I was able to understand Strauss' work and many other writers such as Jose Perez Beduya or Kirstin  Hatch.
 
Chris, thank you so much for your response!
 
 

In addition, the poem mentioned in the prior post below reminds me some of the works in Ronald Palmer's book Logicalogics tho not as exuberant.

BRAISING A BOY


josef horáček

The above poem--which I don't include here for formatting reasons--can be found in La Petite Zine and is one I think has got a great title; braising is almost like raising!  The piece very much seems to be in relation to Lara Glenum--but much more tender.  My only quip is the bit that gets rather Steinean: this piece to me feels to have a root of narrative/event not microtonal manipulations (which I often encourage!) though maybe microtonal does relate to flesh breaking down into a suculent goo.

From a blog-comment box post by Kate Z on her own blog:

"summer camp always seemed very mysterious to me. i wonder if i would have kissed boys (or girls) earlier if i had gone to summer camp. as it was, i think i had my first kiss when i was 16 or 17. i'm a strange one, i guess."

I was twenty three for my "first kiss"--the non mom and dad kind.    Urgh, this seems in-line with heterosexual hegemony, that terrifying--no, terrifyingly natural--dynamic which I despise except I don't totally despise it because the world is heterosexual hegemony and I love the world.

Note: I use the term heterosexual hegemony because homophobia doesn't seem apt: that terms sounds like an involuntary condition--the squeal at a spider--whereas I think there is agency acted out to maintain this state.

Snippets of poems from a blob currently titled Heartbreaking--which it mostly ain't:


"Recast As Anger":

Pretty people jig on a rig


Rats riff on reverence

"Luxury":
Perhaps a pat butters her. Rain
Slaps the shingles of this cottage
Like a less
Charming version of one stayed at in Dingle.
My derriere feels divine.
"Deflective":


Strum beside a flooded river.

What’s so lovely about being carried away

Eyes crack open densities.

"Notes For A Hollywood Script: The Working Class":


It’d be utterly glorious if we could queer the working-class
The heterosexual heartland myth disenfranchises its people
And gives pleasure to the very ones who aren’t them
"Blue-Collar Cock-Suckers":


Before they go down the mine-shaft
Some of them suck another one’s dick
Fuck their buddy’s apple ass
Pull their cock out of their mining chaps
So the tattooed bicep boy can lick and lick

"Working Class As(s) Myth":

Is it just me
Or is it not crazy
To say the myth
Of the working class is white

"Not Working":


The longer the myth lasts
The more the blood and guts--brightness and
Blunder--go un-noticed
So that lives revoke their livings;

"Pickup":
 Package

Belonging
To a ripped hick
With a lip o’ dip--

"Parnassus Thrown To Fill That Grave"


If we go gone
The gone might
Sing us a song

"Underwritten By Privilege":


I harbor cruelties
Regarding class in
My cortex
"Myth Revision":


A wee while back I suggested
Miners are fucking in the lift down the shaft

"Courses":


As the sky turns sere, as fusillades
Fly off from merry-go-rounds,
Synapses flare into fulcrums whose every
Center fringes ecstasy, which runs
Its dendritic course into a delta

"Dear Pete Moore I Hope You Enjoy This Dedication":


Wow, modest
Feelings have
Decided
To saturate
My cellular
Make-up like
Rad eye
Liner on its way to
Music, a few
Notes, a few
Particulars

"Heterosexual Shakeup":
I by the sea

Weed as it’s adrift
By the orca
Getting too
Hot for too little protein

"Solipsistic Dialogue":


Strophe: I forget

Counter: That’s fine

Strophe: True and true

Counter: Locutions

Strophe: So where will you go

Counter: Maybe Montana maybe Moscow

Strophe: Gotcha and maybe I’ll visit

"I Love Painting":


1

It’s not a problem and any claim
To the it has is as solution.
So wouldn’t you rather sniff bubblegum?
I don’t know I would and why I wouldn’t
Assume we’d form concordance
Might be proper respect: signal I don’t
Usurp your wills; or that I won’t make us close enough
Thus where the hell am I when it’s clear I need to be
In loving relation to you; right next each other
Not some beautiful metaphysics
Which in its rest will grow more gorgeous.

"Degraded Juncture: Bright Bracelet":


It’s like butt-munchers are everywhere.
It’s like ass
Lickers are scoping each
Other from every corner.
It’s like fucking disgusting.
It’s like outdated. The straight right
Way is at this
Point so obvious
There’s no excuse.

"Love As It Becomes Agape":


Ego, mine, goes and goes
And goes, gathers into an
Imposing curl like one of the
Strands in the hairdos for that runway
Show which showed artifice
Off to a T, a tippy

"Green: A Factual Fiction":


Threaded, thrummed, tripped upon
Attar, essence of
Avatar, adjusted to the quicks and oopsies
This wonderful world
Proffers if you look away and I can’t

"Carlos Armantrout":


The truth
Burned

The ready
Negatives.

From a Montevidayo blog-post:

Take the Montevidayo Movie Quiz: Are Bonnie&Clyde Straight?

Urgh, once again we get uncritical use of the term "straight" as synonym for
heterosexual; yes, the question cld be said to destabilize, but the word choice
sure don't poke holes in hegemony.  I will repeat and repeat and repeat:
straight ain't a neutral term; let's spell it strayt, or be wild with compounds:
thosewhoaregoodforburning etc.
 

More Musings on Hetero Hegemony

It is now, in the United States, in intellectual circles, a cliche to state that images of perfect women, or no, not perfect, but images of women which are high-fashion, insidiously mess with the psyches of women outside of photographs, till it can become physically/mentally destructive; in other words, the exterior can invade the interior.  With this logic in mind, wldn't it make a lot of sense to wonder whether the desire to have a child/be a mother is wholly natural and may indeed be as much the result of iedology if not more emblamatic?  If it was a cliche to connect lesbians and gay dudes and non-heteros to parenthood, then I agree this proposal could make less sense.  Could this mother desire in fact be massively twined to media culture/the culture of capitalism?  Arguably, the single mosty important subject, aside from men in popular women's fiction, is motherhood/the suggestion that without child, woman isn't fully woman.  I totally get that pondering if procreating/birth is ideological, because it is a real bodily occurence which does not require "artificial" aid in the most general sense, may seem very counter-intuitive; and yah, it is. 

It's always fascinating how two issues which lend lend themselves to similar logics can get insistently identified as very different.  Logic, in that regard, is such an utter pain in the polemicist's ass.

Note: this wondering of mine does not validate terms like Breeder or statements which are overtly mysogynist as opposed to taking a critical stance at heterosexuality.  Yes, most women are heterosexual, but I'd argue there's a difference between having that dynamic be the focus of critique (which may entail using women as representatives of heterosexuality) versus criticizing women in an un-modified way is rather not the same.

Paris Review/FS

I think the poem below is rather engaging: I like how
it seems to be very much stemming from Plath; and,
I definitely am glad to see a 14-liner with end-rhyme (the unrhymed sonnet,
for me, is no sonnet at-all with the exception of some of Gwendolyn
Brooks' off-rhymed pieces) and especially that there's enclosed as opposed
to alternating rhyme. 

Elms


Frederick Seidel



It sang without a sound: music that
The naive elm trees loved. They were alive.
Oh silky music no elm tree could survive.
The head low slither of a stalking cat,
Black panther darkness pouring to the kill,
Entered every elm—they drank it in.
Drank silence. Then the silence drank. Wet chin,
Hot, whiskered darkness. Every elm was ill.
What else is there to give but joy? Disease.
And trauma. Lightning, or as slow as lava.
Darkness drinking from a pool in Java,
Black panther drinking from a dream. The trees
Around the edge are elms. Below, above.
Man-eater drinking its reflection: love.

Assay/Dreck--On Its Way To A "Diamond"?

I am more and more arriving at the notion that heterosexual women and homosexuals are not duh allies, as it is not particularly difficult to find stated: Will and Grace etc. I understand the desire to have connection, and there is connection; but I don’t think being allied and being connected are remotely interchangeable realities.  oops, I mean, or think I mean, by no means are the terms intrinsically so.
Leap:

I find the idea that heterosexuality is a continuum to be symptomatic of negating adequately acknowledging how freakishly stable and hegemonic a phenomena it is; instead of de-stabilizing it, I get the sense that this line of discourse covers up how monstrous it is--how stable it is: the hegemonic force it possesses does not seem to be dissipating at a great rate anytime. It may be technically true, but I see no reason to privilege technical truth over the truth of socialization/ideological influence. Why privilege the ostensibly more natural? And if there’s minimal evidence for heterosexuality being unstable/a continuum, then it’s not even clear that there’s evidence for this state being natural. Perhaps stemming from Jackie Wang and her articulations of how capitalist discourse can easily subsume various ostensibly progressive/“radical” positions to the point where what looks libratory may not be, I wonder if the notion of heterosexual fluidity is kin to the American capitalist fantasia of self-determination/being what you want to be--the notion that you are in control, that you can self-define and that, then, that definition is social reality. I like utopias, but I’m not sure I like the idea of utopic projections being deemed realer replacements for daily street-corners, billboards, school-rooms, which do not seem to match-up. Or, rather, I think these utopic trajectories are lovely but something other than the matrix of socially produced power and that, therefore, grafting can become misleading.

Leap:

I would love to see more analysis of the relative powers of the culturally and/or legislatively disenfranchised . It would be insane of me to identify my gayness as the only determinant; as far as gay goes, I am hyper-enfranchised. It might seem stupid to compare two beggars who, in terms of money, are both far below the poverty line; but what if, despite them both missing limbs, one of them is really in other ways duh gorgeous whereas the other one is missing limbs and is totally yucky looking. It’s definitely no guarantee of a measurably better experience, but is there no potential for micro-improvements? Yes, one could argue that the worse-looking beggar could receive more pity, but is that assumption definitively valid? Is there such thing as so nasty-looking you can’t even obtain a good position to beg at? I’d argue that there is definitely the existence of a location hierarchy for begging.

Leap:

I think it is true that this bout of theorizing is behind the times in terms of academic discursive developments; if it seems regressive, I think that’s fair. But that view could also be symptomatic of privilege. And privilege isn’t necessarily bad; the freakiness, for me, is when it’s not consistently, thoroughly acknowledged. Though it may seem disingenuous/hypocritical, I am glad for theoretical zoom-zooms. I don’t think anything I’ve tried to express must be in strictest opposition; instead, I’d like to see statements which are rigorously dialectical. This stance/performance, of course, is very time consuming and doubles the effort involved, and so many may deem my wish too much.  I certainly am inadequate in this regard!

Leap:

I am really scared smart heterosexual women will decide I had best get the F out of language-waves. I am scared that I appear to be a sophistic mysogynist. I am also appalled at this fear as I feel--at-least in my own mind (if it is my own)--that this skittering is extremely feminist.

Leap:

To state that one’s subject position has a problem is, in itself, a marker of privilege. My sense of privilege is very likely about as degraded as it gets: I am not at-all sure I believe in natural/inalienable rights; or, rather, I ‘m not sure I believe that state is other than a dream with no-where like mass wordly evidence. I like dreams, but I find climes where brute oppressive force has its ways to be a more engaging place to theorize liberation; I don‘t want that force to be elided/disguised. I do, though, want the mechanics to be identified/analyzed in hyper nuanced ways.

Leap:

I am not content with my “conclusion” regarding these gaps/aporias/elisions/contradictions ; it, to me, feels utterly incomplete---mmm, I probably mean unsatisfactory not incomplete.


Note: I am grateful to Kate Zambreno for allowing me to so actively participate within her blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister (I have opted not to italicize not to mark this production as lower on the totem than a book, but because the blog, so long as it is still actively added to, seems to me to be other than finished and bound) as it is precisely that participation which, I sense, has put me in a position to write the above mess.

Second note: Kate, my computer seems to be grumpy with your blog-comment system and so when I press preview or post or whatever exactly the two icons are the comment-space just goes blank; ok why would I assume just because I don't respond to every stage in our discourse that you wld feel ignored!
I hope all's as well as well can, currently, be for all of any of any-ya'll!

I just realized the duh smmary of my most intense current intellectual interest: thinking about and trying to document heterosexual female privilege.  There has of course been lots of attention paid to male hetero privilege, and I think it is high time to look at the other side of that record.  I don't imagine I am proposing a brand new focus, btw; but I do believe more o' this cld be helpful and, at best, in ways which will be painful/difficult, empower hetero women.  Gross the way in order to try and make more discurrsive space for lesbians I feel compelled to make sure I do hetero marketing; oh well, such is working within hegemony.  And actually I believe constraints are often great at making for more creativity/more comprehensive analysis.

Scattered Bits

A poem I just wrote less than a minute ago, and which took less than 7 minutes to "compose":

A kind of brail, a


Kind one, malady

Its uncanny manifestation,

Elation, sorest

Estivation, tip and

Stipulation

At the center of

A volume whose

Spine is

Thirteen inches wide,

A constant

Compress, wavering

Compass

Keeps sparks on course.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Every now and then I read a line of thought stating humans can become animal, or the dynamics of humans on their way to the animal: J Skinner and Delueze come to mind.  I don't really get this---ok, yah, I do, but it seems a tad wonky: humans are animals!  True, humans have a grossly asymetrical relation to other organisms, but we certainly are in the animal matrix!  There may be a need to, rhetorically, become one, because many---most---may not agree with me that pigs and bonobos and parakeets are kin, but I'd "argue" that this becoming animal rhetoric is really just a way of tuning in to elided reality rather than actually altering it in the truthytruthtruthiest sense.  Then again, I guess if one believes that they are permanently estranged from aardvarks and stoplight parrot-fish, then the becoming animal trope cld be just the logic needed.

Note: I am not even sure fish count as animals were I talking to a biologist; the above is me doing some sketchy musing, not world-class, utterly accurate articulation.

I like these lines [from Evie Shockley's poem Sound Effects]:

we know how birth sounds—but

what is the sound of a birth defect?

from Unto

Here, in the alembic corpse, where the cortex
Seethes, I lie and loll and metamorphose
Myself into the most supple
Pleating; and then frogs mistake me for lily pads
Which makes perfect sense:
I must, like flowers upon ponds, appear floating
And don’t you just
Love how self-aggrandizing I am----isn’t such
A stance so seductive; yes, yes, I assume
You feel the
Pull of
My words, my oozing
Reality; or is that expression on your face a formality
Meant to quell
And sends deeper unto hell by accident, by
Volition I can’t
Fathom than to call
Insane: the membrane which has failed
To understand its filtering function, has failed
To be what it is and thus can’t
Even qualify as counterfeit of some other
Dynamic but merely stands wrong, stands
Ripe to collapse into wracks,
Regrets, a slow unsteady anguish, a chafing, a chastening,
Channel and
Overflow, official and interstitial, intuition and
Architrave chiseled
Out by a patient ballsy thief sporting tits
So let’s spell out tittsy not ballsy, and anyways you
Don’t give a tosh and that’s fine
Because I have forged you for my own entertainment; I have forged
You that you may dress
In vintage Versace and ballet
Flats, trill and
Trounce upon
My witticisms which have
Grown weary
Of themselves and anything other than stilettos after five pm
If you are, as
You are, a siren whose caramel curls
Activate the activity known as seeing to some other realm of action, to the
Sublime or at-least subtlest sophistry
Like, like, like, like
Simulacrum won’t suffice nor will seraphim, philandering, patching
Up immortal portals which, well, I’m un
Able to deem relevant now or ever, but never
Is never the point.

[big Ellipsis]

I remind myself I am supposed to be haunted as I stalk through this green.


My hair swings like a hammer, but instead of sprains there are silky strays.

I do not condition my hair, nor do I believe silk to be my hair’s innate state.

Through letters the limiting course is eclipsed, then clipped and dipped in enamel.

The I extrapolates unto a totality, unto a titrate and its profile.

She wanted, desperately, to believe fear other than instinctual.

On four legs, it rose, and the rose reared up too.

From Roxane Gay's essay on The Help

I very much admire the passages below; they so wonderfully don't hide inconvenient feelings, and it's so lovely to read feelings which are both tough and utterly generous:

"I think of myself as progressive and open-minded but I have biases and in reading and watching The Help, I have become painfully aware of just how biased I can be. My real problem is that The Help is written by a white woman. The screenplay is written by a white man. The movie is directed by that same white man. I know it’s wrong but in my heart, I think, “How dare they?”


Writing across race (or gender, sexuality, and disability) is complicated. Sometimes, it is downright messy. There is ample evidence that it is quite difficult to get difference right, to avoid cultural appropriation, reinscribing stereotypes, revising or minimizing history, or demeaning and trivializing difference or otherness. As writers we are always asking ourselves, “How do I get it right?” That question becomes even more critical when we try to get race right, when we try to find authentic ways of imagining and re-imagining the lives of people with different cultural backgrounds and experiences. Writing difference requires a delicate balance and I don’t know how we strike that balance.

I write across race, gender, and sexuality all the time. I would never want to be told I can’t write a story where the protagonist is a white man or a Latina lesbian or anyone who doesn’t resemble me. The joy of fiction is that in the right hands, anything is possible. I firmly believe our responsibility as writers is to challenge ourselves to write beyond what we know as much as possible. When it comes to white writers working through racial difference, though, I am conflicted, and, I am learning, far less tolerant than I should be. If I take nothing else from the book and movie in question, I know I have work to do. For that reason alone, I don’t regret engaging with these texts.



I don’t expect writers to always get difference right but I do expect writers to make a credible effort. The Help demonstrates that some writers shouldn’t try to write across race and difference. Kathryn Stockett tries to write black women but she doesn’t try hard enough. Her depictions of race are almost fetishistic unless they are downright insulting. At one point in the book, Aibileen compares her skin color to that of a cockroach, you know, the most hated insect you can think of. Aibileen says, staring at a cockroach, “He big, inch, inch an a half. He black. Blacker than me.” That’s simply bad writing but it’s an even worse way of writing difference. If white writers can’t do better than to compare a cockroach to black skin, perhaps they should leave the writing of difference in more capable hands. In The Help, Stockett doesn’t write black women. She caricatures black women, finding pieces of truth and genuine experience and distorting them to repulsive effect. She makes a very strong case for writers strictly writing what they know, not what they think they know or know nothing about."


The only quip  I have is with the last sentence, which seems to counter-act the more difficult and interesting vision for art expressed in earlier moments.  This could be me being merely personal: I almost never know what I'm writing----be it about me, or gay "brethren" or Lesbian sisters or women or geography.

True, true: the post before this one is rather grumpy--apologies!

I'd like to build a list of contemporary lesbian poets--readers (well I assume there are none but...) please help!

It is irritating to have poems accepted and then have the journal decide to shutdown and one is not notified till wayyyy late.

Too, will I ever get a response regarding my submission to a forthcoming POMO Pastoral anthology?

I wld love to be an editor but know I don't have the needed skills to cut it as one; or one who is not maddeningly disorganized.

Journals which never respond are frustrating--especially when one writes them more than once asking what's up?

That said, I admire editors: it's just some have their shit together and others seem rather bumbling.

Urgh--I just wrote a terrific post and lost it; urgh.

Wee recap: how write--sing!--woman (eeky singular, I agree) without singing heterosexism.  Can one?  No, not one; can we; will that we always be a wee one?

Homo-hetero divide as (and in terms of need for critical recognition, more) important as male-female divide.

I, personally, think of heterosexual women as totally like men (and vice-versa) because of the heterosexual common denominator.

The male female divide is a great way to divert attention from the hetero-homo one, and to downplay feminism's frequent complictity in heterosexual hegemony.  It is also a great fit with capitalism, and may be more geniunly the naturalization of marketing/Maddison avenue as much as anything else.

For straight I propose strayt!  A touch didactic, a touch homosexist?: yes, that cld very well be, and the being not very well.

Straight is not neutral, it is judgmental; it is insidious because it masquerades as neutral; it is used by feminists all the time (should I give a list of examples or wld that look like cruel intention?) and I assume this is habitual/non-critical language use; and that, dear world, strikes me as utterly unfeminist.

I wonder if literary feminism--that articulated by poetry and fiction writers and hybrid aesthetics etc--is likelier to use straight than heterosexual.  I'm not positive but I have a hard time imagining M Nussbaum not using heterosexual.

From Claudia Keelan (via Christina Mengert's review of Missing Her at Constant Critic):

 “…the insistence of self being other—it was the only word for the moment and continues to be, I believe, no matter what polarity you describe: man-woman, citizen-nation, nation-world. Any definition that does not take the Whole into consideration is an incomplete one. Radical freedom is the only whole measure—that’s what I hope to teach, to reach.”

I believe the words above (the quoted ones) are really beautifully true/ambitious/humane.

From Mani Rao:

"Hard after a hunt Diana
Flirts water at Actaeon"

I like this (from Terrance Hayes' Ploughshares intro to the volume he's edited):

You will find this stupendous Plath sentence: “They are panes of ice, // A vice of knives, / A piranha / Religion, drinking // Its first communion out of my live toes.” That’s hot, right? That’s what this place is all about.

A Poem I wrote Like 5 Minutes Ago

I a brogue, I a
Motif
Mirrors
Votive
Candles

And you, you are
Grammatically
Correct
Cracks me up.

Katydid lungs
Keep measure
Metastasizing
Thousands of flowers
Till marigolds
Taxonomically
Belong
To collar-bones.

I a logarithm, I
An emaciated
Saturation
Summering

In the vasts
Spanning
Twixt minus
Seven and
Sixty degrees
Where marrow-numbing
Blizzardbows are brighter
Than the insides of candystripe beets.

Serbian Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns

I admire the passage below, from Jackie Wang's blog:

Some people have asked me what my opinion is on Lady Gaga and my reply has been mostly one of indifference. My criticism of Lady Gaga isn’t that she’s a “bad” feminist—it’s that she’s a capitalist hack who collects artists of color to increase her cred (gah). But I get the sense that most people who celebrate Lady Gaga for her performance artist schtick aren’t critical of capitalism. Counter-critics assert that Lady Gaga is not glorifying commodity culture but parodying it by offering herself as a “figurative mirroring or projection of consumer culture.” The problem with such an argument is that ironic derision, risk, spectacles, subversion, and transgression are all thoroughly integrated into the polymorphous techniques of capitalism and are indeed representative of its flexibility, its ever-expanding markets and its ability to appeal even to intellectuals, queers, feminists, and politicos of varying sorts. The “transgressive” tactics employed by Gaga produce what Michel Foucault might call an “incitement to discourse”—igniting blog posts, cultural criticism, theory which effectively produces the image of Gaga and generates value, meaning, and interest in her project while transgression-as-capitalist tactic remains obscured. 

Tusculum Review

     I have a poem posted at the Tusculum Review website; please take a look: http://www2.tusculum.edu/tusculumreview/2011/01/17/adam-strauss-2/

I hope all's well!