Monday, February 28, 2011

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.

Friday, February 18, 2011

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.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

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.