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!

From a Montevidayo post regarding The Black Swan:
 
"In the comment field to a previous post Adam Strauss suggested that Nina is a lesbian, but I think that’s making her too stable."
 
The above response strikes me as participating--accidentally I suspect--in the well established discourse of lesbian erasure.  For something to be visible there--typically--is a minimal degree of stability required, so to jump (as the comment does in the bit I didactically leave out) to emphasizing an instable sexuality seems to me to be a move in collusion with the prior mentioned erasure; or if not erasure just uninterest.  Now if it was stated that the character in question--Nina--is for sure not clearly a heterosexual, then I'd be less suspicious of this comment.  As may be clear, I find the notion of polysexuality--or sexuality as unstable electron-cloud etc--very problematic: it seems to afford the opportunity to bypass just how terribly rigid sexuality exists in situated circumstances happening off the page or out of the performance or frame or art-space.   That said, I don't think utopical theorizing/rendering the world wonderfully aesthetic and outside conventional political restraints is bad; just very simultaneously problematic, and perhaps a great vehicle for subtle forms of heterosexual hegemony.  If someone wants to go to logoslalafantabulastic land (or more like outre atmosphere)--and I often want to and do--yay--but please clearly cite counter-arguments to that stance! 

I need to finally write up a review of S Simonds Warsaw Bikini!

A Mess Of Fry

Once upon tines.
Tinsel telescopes collapsing a soundscale.
Trips and wires.
Viruses as lookouts.
Viral arias.
Scission teetering at the top of immune to toppling.
Ripcurls rankle rapport.
Curls clue us into outré.
Outsiders snuggle.
Insiders struggle.
Interiors resemble the chambers of expensive seashells.
Lustrous undersides.
Bellies and belies.
Tropes ride meridians like cowboys hold-on to bull-bucks.
Ropes made from tropical fibers.
What does all mean?
All doesn’t.
Eggs and a scrambled game of The Dozens.
Eggs and eggs.
Ducks.
An ideogram for an egg no bird lays.
An extinct bird in a contemporary sentence.
A sentence in the manner of the 17th century writ in bird-blood.
Manners glance at mannerist paintings.
Ants crawl over thick blue strokes.
The blue changes from second to second till it’s a color there’s no English word for.


Becoming Another Species

Fish on their way to flying.
Flight concluding in crushed lungs.
Light no-one can see this surround’s so dark.
No species in the vicinity of here can hear these soundwaves.
Looking at these chipped plates helps make sense of sentience.
Fine lines which don’t matter at a distance or close-up. 
Final breaths before more.
Starts without precedents.
Art with uncanny incidents.
Tar with echoing myths.
Relief and remittance interloping the other.
Flagged down.
Fags getting’ up.
Pansies storm down foregrounding a marlin being gaffed.

More A Less point

Graceless lace.

Caul wrapped around a lollypop for the heaven of it.

Calls for the heave of it.

Heaven of it a pointlessness.

Pointlessness a splendid.

A sentence from Stein sashays out of its pulpy bondage.

Sentences split from their spines.

Excision as very-very-very bloody and the bleeding cerebral.

Brain blood.

Flushed cortex.

Brainy sex.

Bloody sexuality.

Heterosexual versus homosexual S and M.

Turn as chiasmus.


Why have I singlespaced the first two pieces, and not the third one posted?  Why grant greater pauses?  Lace doesn't clearly link to more space!