From "Grief Abstracts," Julie Carr (Boston Review, 2009). I love how, despite being a prose-poem, and somewhat fragmented, Hopkins' timbre rings clear:

Grief of fire in its final flash and
                                smolder. The weight of her speaks spark’s brief ire become ash,
                                                                                                                                    become
ruinous food full of dolor. To recall her laughter is to grow older. Fear’s rife in
this filial order. If molded, I’m fodder for air, and I’m colder. Since I lost her I
stored her like ore in my form as if later I’d find her, restore her.

Here, too, are some lines from Joyelle McSweeney's Contagious Knives (excerpt from the Poetry Society of America):

Devil (to Swan, amiably)

Have you heard the buzz?
Each screen is hot with it, each watch and pocket.
How the kid enlistee cowers in the dumps
He looks like this one, narcissistine,
Stripped naked, as he's a threat to himself
on a very high level!
His name is Bradley Manning.
He's a puppet and a larva, a pupa, and a ghost
A ghost orchid, moth, I mean a goat.
If we were tragedians
we'd play his slit throat,
We'd play the ghost pipe, the bag & faggot,
the bundle of bees. On my bundle of knees.
But alas we're only tatties, falsies
we live in glass bottles
we report and you decide, deicide. 

I particularly like "play his slit throat"--"play" makes for such a wonderfully sinister verb-choice!  And the "goat"/throat" rhyme totally echoes this amazing moment in Elizabeth Bishop's "Crusoe in England," a poem I LOVE:

"But then I’d dream of things  

like slitting a baby’s throat, mistaking it   

for a baby goat."

 

Bishop's lines are actually quite a bit more sinister: with McSweeney's poem one is clearly in the realm of play (and this work is from a drama!)--albeit that which is deadly serious. 

 

Finally, I dig JM's "we'd play the ghost pipe, the bag and faggot."  In this line, fire--bonfire of the vanities?!--burns, sends its smokes, its signals, and limns--ghosts--bag-pipe and the smoking body of a Gay man under immolation.  Smoke as like ghost--that makes sense to me.  And, too, the spectral bag-pipe makes sense: surely sucking--"blowing"--cock could be deemed akin to playing that gutsy instrument.

 

 

  

After a bit more leafing through other Hyperallergic pieces, I am fortunate enough to meet this bit of absolutely awesome--an interview with a photographer and documentary maker named Zanele Muholi:

Depicting an Existence So Far Violently and Blaringly Erased

• by Claire Breukel on January 17, 2012

This notice from Hyperallergic 2012 is sooooooooooooooooooo wonderful!:

Small Town Gay Community

• by Alicia Eler on November 15, 2012

 

I should probably write an essay on why I am so moved by this piece/the artist (in this case, photographer) and realities it features, but for the time being am going to silently be stirred.

I really like Sandra Simonds' poem "I Am In Room One Eleven," which appears in thefanzine.  This piece is longish, and I like its irrepressible quality.  Too, it seems much closer in timbre/lineaments to her wonderful first book, Warsaw Bikini, than many other poems of hers I've read recently, which cheers me--as the poems in that volume still strike me as her best.  At any rate, I recommend checking out the aforesaid poem, as well as her poetry in general--which tends towards the terrifically lively, and engagingly works talky/talk-like/talkative tones...a mode I think tends towards being rather blah; so I love that Simonds is able to create energetic stagings via an aesthetic I am, oftener than not, not a fan of.  I think I like this talkative quality, in the case of Simonds, because she is not actually trying to transcribe speech--to merely imprint a page with what's already there/made: she--rather the poems--likes grand shapely stanzas, likes dynamic line-breaks, likes sound and play--in other words the poems take advantage of many of the elements that traditionally constitute poetry.

Submitting Book Manuscript Question

Is this pitching--to Black Ocean--of a manuscript titled Smoked Marrow Scream Cream engaging or off-putting/makes barf and bile fountain up one's windpipe:

Hello, it's Adam Strauss. I am submitting a manuscript titled Smoked Marrow Scream Cream. It consists of two sections: Feminist Pig, and Blue Ossuary. This collection is not long, but aims to pack opera upon opera of wallop. The poems contained within it are aggressive, jocular, plain and plainly ornate. They aim to devastate and be devastatingly funny--friendly-Grinch smack to femur. Put another way: they're Homosexual Prophecy, but with prophet cindered. I would be thrilled--and then more thrilled than that--if this manuscript is deemed apt match for Black Ocean. So far, few of the constituent poems have been published, but the following pieces do appear in Cricket Online Review: Work We Do For Hegemony; Glass Of Milk With Apparitions; BloodHot Mineral Planet; Lungs Are Grammatical.

I Like This

from Feng Sun Chen's Ugly Fish:

I don’t care about poetry. 
I slap it around. 
Poetry is my bitch. 
I put a collar on it. The collar has a bell. The bell is pink. 
Fuck bitches.

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

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

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You cannot tell when I am lying and when I am not. 
That is because I am sincere about my lies.

Sincerely Mockery

HETEROSEXUALITY

THE COW has been called a heterosexual book.  THE COW is not a heterosexual book.  So far, however, the world is composed of people who exist because a man and a woman copulated and a woman got pregnant and gave birth.  Sexuality, the sex act, desire, and what it takes to make a human: I should make a Venn diagram, because they aren’t all the same. 

THE COW is concerned with maternity, not heterosexuality per se.

 

Sexuality, the sex act, desire, and what it takes to make a human: I should make a Venn diagram, because they aren’t all the same: OK, sure, fair enough--but also wonky, as not all the same does not necessarily mean wholly distinct either.  I kind of like the distinction between maternity and heterosexuality, but also find it disingenuous: the world--every country in it--is quite happy to equate the two (though maybe the Netherlands and a few in vicinity are starting to erode this equation?  It has sure as hello not reached sufficient "mass" in the USA); many countries can barely fathom the phenomena as not one and the same.  Basically, I think this statement of Reines severely underestimates Heterosexuality (not capitalizing it is one clue; it should be capitalized--it's truly major, and majorly connected to Capitalism).  I get that she wants to divorce her Cow--cunt, as a wife has?  Cute if we're dealing with a Stein allusion--from Heterosexuality, because Heterosexuality, although totally sexy and mm scrumptious and sexy and sexy and sexy and seductive, is gross, HEGEMONIC, cruel, crueler than that, then even crueler--oh but yummy, yummy, so good, mm!  Biceps, pectorals, perfectly bodied manly men--so delicious; and tall itsy bitsy blond--died, duh--girls with tits (pert, pretty jumbo, it's all good) and perfect make-up and silky hair, yay for Anna Selezneva, though her beauty seems quite natural, the superior rigged kind: natural men and women are more often than not going to be aesthetically inferior, and unless I'm talking to you, who cares how you think compared to the way you look!--but if you are a screaming Heterosexual (and though I have not read The Cow, I have read other Reines poems, and they are very Heterosexual--which is to say, at the least which is more than most, very human), I vote for wearing your hegemony on your sleeve.   I think that'd be rather cool--much more so than THE COW is not a heterosexual book...snooze: CEO logic.