Subsection, Steaming Cleave
]]>
Extents and how to keep extents extant is of concern here.
Brought us so much to establish. To embellish. Found glands and gothic lamps with lichen as their baste.
These were pushing against us gently. Making us their congealed contours. Thickening.. Gelling.
That this was how we aged, beneath. That this is our serial pact.
Perhaps spirituality is the non-linear cosmic memory of our cells and our cells can be injured by
injection with rough curtains or curtails.
We could not fairly fear what had placed us here. We could not refuse what might allow us future re.
Therefore we had to participate in and incorporate death and decay. We refused to feel it as decoy.
We named it. We named ourselves within it, to somehow find a way to make our suffering belated,
by way of shucking senses while we were here. We are here. We choose to shuck our own while we sink
and float. We elect to renew the shredded and stained sails.
We identify as human and as other-than human.
Down here, fragrances move through the softly tipped thistles, as harmonic ballet. To convey where an
open window also means in likeness to a womb. Means baring sweet unexpected ulteriors. As it sinks, the
window does feel like it is being bombarded by fluid. Like it is being filled with non-syntactical valor. It
is the ache in the ulterior throats such as these, that makes us pursuers. Perusers.
j/j hastain is the author of several cross-genre books including the trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press), anti-memoir a vigorous (Black Coffee Press/Eight Ball Press) and The Xyr Trilogy: a Metaphysical Romance. j/j’s writing has most recently appeared in Caketrain, Trickhouse, The Collagist, Housefire, Bombay Gin and Aufgabe. j/j has been a guest lecturer at Naropa University and University of Colorado.
]]>
Poems
]]>
"Our book presents, not theories, but revelations."
--Abbott Handerson Thayer
Abbott Thayer was a late 19th, early 20th century artist and naturalist whose discoveries in animal coloration provided the blueprint for camouflage during WWI, earning him his nickname, "the father of camouflage."
Adam Fagin's work has appeared in Web Conjunctions, Volt, Fence and many other journals. His manuscript, T's Law, was a finalist for the Ahsahta's 2012 Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the Colorado Prize for Poetry. He lives in Oakland, CA.
Poems
]]>
No Memoir
Some accidental sage tells us
our future is closer than our past.
Is it? What of the former will be
Foreclosed and become a was?
Every now is, was. The present is, or was,
once, purely future, inconceivable expanse
only by its being unfulfilled, then.
Tomorrow, inscrutable time-to-come,
is what’s constantly missed, being ever
after the fact, in going, is, already, gone.
Where can we dissolve in the mystery-promise,
ahead? How? When every horizon arrives
the instant it’s actual, and each instant’s
consumed by all that’s come to pass?
On the Set
However young, inspiring,
something, voluminous,
you are petals, perhaps,
fascinating, visited, wide-
spreading throughout
countless venerable
and difficult
American centers.
Everything is a want, blooming;
some, stimulated to celebration,
adapt to subjects; this is the exalted
relationship live cinema wants out of,
but don’t you yourself
throw contradiction past contemplation?
Audiences that always find weeping beautiful can select their glory.
Daybreak specimens
upright and with something
handed there
small productions
scattered in teenage America
flexible, independent, interesting;
sure to photograph missed business
the flowering sexuality much in
with frustrated Europe and Japan,
film, honestly fleeting, young,
and, perhaps, without reality
but see from expressed, intellectual
actresses, they’re some feeling,
that is so, and possible, reflecting American branches that surround one.
Most know but often have to record other theatre.
Frustrating greedy camera.
Used, we know where.
Iteration
All novelty starts in imitation.
Every day, I stands-in for anonymous me.
The infant’s face throws back
two faces already around us
and every knock and bang resounds an impact, after its fact.
We live the duplicity of a handheld fan.
It imitates the wind, mimics an absent breeze.
Unnatural, it is nature: palm leaf, ostrich plume.
The Chinese name it feathers for house dwellers.
Its whalebone handle doubles as a flute.
One imitates a wartime flag fringed by lace.
Or a roundel trapped inside a bonus shell.
Other iterations ape a half moon sunk under dense froth.
Its unfurling copies a pre-flight arc in an eagle’s wing.
It is dotted to sprout clusters of impossible perennials.
Later it is forged from willow parchment by heathen conspirators.
When it opens on a funky stage, its gates hide the expressions of an actress
sliding one self over one self, revealing by masking the heiress whose eyes
transmit through its screen the dated news of the nerves beneath the skin.
Vidre
Vidre was in the greenery
Naked save the sandals
The trail was rutted
The trail was not a hunter’s track
The trail was not a fisherman’s path
No bicycles were anywhere
There were no dogs in this greenery
There were no children
There was no veiling glare after the warm rain
There were no puddles left
Vidre was in the greenery
Naked save the sandals
She layered broad leaves, five broad leaves, on the rutted trail
And she sat on the thin pillow of leaves on the trail in the sun
There was no coast, no tide, nothing beyond the woods in the greenery
There was no emergency
There were parting clouds and swaying hawthorn flora -- flowers
There was no black fence to stop visitors or the mutts trampling the mandrakes
There were no signs to say what could be and what wasn’t allowed
It was mid-spring and overhead bridal branches stank of musky sap
Vidre, sitting on the leaves she’d layered on the trail,
Clutched a manure-stained, heart-shaped leaf to hide her grin.
Dispute Without Words
You started after me and then stopped and gave up and went
And if I had looked back I might have seen you and understood
I had not been on my own as I’d assumed, given the dead quiet.
You were timid. I wasn’t mindful. So? Maybe this poem is obvious
And obviously a sign, a dispute without words. There are no worse
Errors, lovers, than leaving unknowing where you’d been wanted.
Tim Keane is the author of the poetry collection Alphabets of Elsewhere (Cinnamon Press, 2007). He has finished a new collection of poems called So Much Headgear in Search of a Riot. New poems from this collection have come out this year in US, UK and Australia-based online magazines Evergreen Review, Wild Orphan, Streetcake, Gobbet, and Otholiths.
]]>
Darkwave Art
]]>
Matthew Vickerstaff owns and runs Darkwave Art, a music-based graphic design company. Projects have included Cradle of Filth, My Dying Bride, Darkthrone, Enslaved and Katatonia, to name a few. http://www.darkwaveart.co.uk/
]]>Fluttertongue 5
Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2011
As prairie poet Steven Ross Smith writes in “A Note on the Titles and Other Acknowledgements” at the back of his Fluttertongue 5: everything appears to shine with mossy splendour (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2011):
Several years ago, fellow poet and collaborator Hillary Clark introduced me to the work of the American poet Elizabeth Willis via her book Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan University Press, 2006) which I found to be a gem. Then I read Willis' earlier book Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003). These works spoke to me and led me out of a lull and into new work that became what you read here.
I took a few words from the text in Willis' first poem in Meteoric Flowers as the title to generate my own poem. This became a compelling force, driving the poem, and so I continued to do so with each of her poems in the two books mentioned. I took her words as my title and catalyst, then began to shape my own poem. I resisted taking her most lovey and elegant and complete phrases, because I did not want to co-opt her creations. Instead I took words beside each other, but that often lacked 'completeness' as a phrase. I must say, they have come to make complete sense and lose their oddity as I have lived with them for so long now. The result is the eighty-nine pieces included here. Thank you, Elizabeth Willis.
The fifth in a series of titles that include Fluttertongue 4: Adagio for the Pressured Surround (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2007), Fluttertongue Book 3: disarray (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2005), Fluttertongue Book 2: The Book of Emmett (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2000) and Fluttertongue Book 1: The Book of Games (Saskatoon SK: Thistledown Press, 1998), there aren't that many examples of multiple book poetic projects in Canadian writing in some time. Certain of the late bpNichol's work come to mind, being the most over examples of such, whether through his multiple-volume books of The Martyrology, or the four linked collections that started with love: a book of remembrances (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1974), or more recently, Dennis Cooley's ongoing “love in a dry land” project, published so far in the collections Country Music: New Poems (Vernon BC: Kalamalka Press, 2004) and The Bentley Poems (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006). There have been other threads working through author's works, including Gil McElroy's ongoing sequence, “Some Julian Days,” which appear in sections throughout his four trade collections, or larger works that come together much later in the process, including Robert Kroetsch's Completed Field Works (1989) and Robin Blaser's The Holy Forest (1995). But how many deliberately work on a larger multiple-volume work at the beginning of the process? It's something I've worked on as well, including a quintet of poetry collections, beginning with wild horses (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2010) that has yet to fully see print.
For former Saskatchewan poet (currently the Director of Literary Arts at The Banff Centre) Steven Ross Smith, the coherence of his ongoing “fluttertongue” project appears to be a sequence of book-length experiments, each working a different consideration on how a poetry collection is built, each stemming from a different series of triggers. The comparisons made between this and bpNichol's The Martyrology (made, also, by Gerry Shikatani in his blurb for the collection) are there, but only tenous; both are multi-book length works, but have few more connections. For this, the fifth book, Smith works off the poetry of American poet Elizabeth Willis, specifically two of her works, using her own lines to generate his own. From Willis' tight and compact lines, her short-lined cadence, Smith has expanded into prose poems with a long and lovely lyric movement, highly aware of just how sound might possibly move, flowing easily from line to line. Underneath each of his prose pieces is a short trio of lines and phrases, the suggestion of a boiled-down text reminiscent of some of Margaret Christakos' writing. According to a short article posted online May 5, 2011 on Winnipeg's Uptown, written by Quentin Mills-Fenn, the short second text is actually another sequence, running along the bottom of the collection as a sidebar to the main text, a long poem about moss. Mills-Fenn writes:
At the bottom of each page Smith provides a different text, a sequence playing on the natural characteristics of that humble entity, moss. These mossy bits were inspired when Smith was relaxing, but still working, on the B.C. coast.
"I often go the islands to write," he says. "I have a demanding job, so I go away to write. You know, Galiano Island is very wet. I must have been there last year and I started to get really interested in moss. So I picked up a book about it. And I started to write about it.
It becomes frustrating to note the lack of attention Smith's project has received, on the whole, for books two through four up for Saskatchewan Book Awards (with the third finally receiving one), but remarkably few reviews. In a review of the fifth volume recently on the electricruckus blog, Douglas Barbour wrote that the “fluttertongue” series “is slowly building into Steven Ross Smith’s magnum opus, the ongoing poem that will eventually define his oeuvre as a whole.” The beauty of such an ongoing project is that it begins to become a kind of “catch-all,” allowing everything to fall into it because it is open enough that it could be anything, and where he might go next, only he might suspect.
The Stolen Pear
Phrase is dropped from pop (culture) to pyrus (aboreal genus), initial letters found to be the same. The fresh-from-oven-bread-waft spreads its sweet and oaty scent to nuzzle in the nose. A fruitloaf, a pillow of sensation so think it beckons a head to drop to it. Fahrenheit or centigrade cause degrees of confusion. A framed harvest returns to haunt the tension of the lines. Done and set beside the fruitful bowl, looks like a Cézanne still-life. Snow on the deck-chair, a cushion too. No forbidding or theft at the window but with curtains filled with holes to let the light, the room a blossom. A wish to give Ms. Willis another cameo but a wish is not enough to spot her in the street, or in a hooded parka, but possibly in the evolution section of the Olin Memorial Library. Argentina Santos' fado, in iPod headphones, moves saudade over the ocean to a listener's ears into his body, slows him and bends him ever-so-slightly, through not a word in his ken. Yet a hike props the whole day up and might enable a grasp of psychological truth and a sense of pick-pocketing the day. Speak a rhythm with a juicy mouthful, the soundtrack a spirited aubade. Heroes of the word lead to strangeness, love and rubato's patterned sponteneity. A challenge to break and go on; a bite, a puff into hands cupped over the lips, a glimpse through winter's early grab, a tree splendid, still bounteous with its gold and russett, its swollen seeds unseasonably released.
of red—sunset, wine and fire engine;
Flush
of red—lust, embarrassment, hypertension;
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections Songs for little sleep, (Obvious Epiphanies, 2012), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and kate street (Moira, 2011), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.
]]>
Paintings & Prints
]]>
Y #69
To Wait
X original
Inner Thread
Electric Beings
Telepathy
Our Sacred Heart
Under the Ground 4/4
Carmen Figueroa is a NYC-based artist originally from Mexico City, where the rich culture became a major influence in her visual language. She grew up surrounded by the overwhelming baroque tradition in architecture that survives from the colonial era, as well as the famous muralist tradition and gritty underground urban culture. As a teenager she started her Fine Arts Education at the Mexican Fine Arts Institute. There, she received various awards from the National Fine Arts Institute. At a young age, she moved to NYC to pursue a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts. She recently obtained an MFA from Brooklyn College, School of Art. http://www.carmen-gallery.com/
]]>Poems
]]>Encode
first come the senses
hundreds of flush blossoms, fragrance, spring curled around blue sky
hippocampus with frontal cortex analyzes sensory inputs
beings bridge the distance between bodies and tree—same speed—thus motionless
long-term memory-worth
cherry blossoms bloom beyond change
bits stored in various parts of brain
clap of thunder, movement of water
a message leaps and connects across gaps between nerve cells at synapse
windflowerrain
dendrites, feathery tips of brain cells, extend to neighboring cells
one blossom bears many blossoms
electrical firing releases neurotransmitters
lightning against fence posts
diffuse across spaces between cells
inflorescence snow across the earth beneath trees (mind-ground)
as changes occur at synapses and dendrites, more connections created
outsidein
first you pay attention
mountains, river, and earth
much is filtered out
thorn bushes
how you pay attention determines what you remember
old branches, which do not reach
Storage
stages serve as filters, keep one from overwhelming flood
her favorite color red, as part of her (in)eternal palate, a warm color
sensory juncture allows perception—visual, a sound, a touch
she takes her color and puts it into any operation
impulses linger, a moment, after stimulation ends
takes the feeling of touch, makes it a green room
a short term phenomenon breezes in after the flash
she remembers his number, brushed in orange
repetition made the shift to long term more promising
“Lady Sings the Blues” is still her favorite song because
she holds the information of him, indefinitely
Retrieval
from unconscious to conscious mind by will
painting the horse
some memory components are more efficient than others
to penetrate one thing is to penetrate many things
for example, she forgets where she left the paintbrush
a failed attempt to be intimate with the stroke
no memory of its location
still, when she paints she experiences the brush directly
no mismatch between cues and encoding
her realization
she could retrieve the memory accurately
words, letters, and shapes a remedy for satisfaction
Under the Home
under mind’s home, there are many homes
and beneath many homes a memory mansion
children play records, mouth initials of those they love
over and over windows burst wide open
a mansion made of stone binds to self
not a slippery slope up—years open-armed—
but connection between mind and moving
below the memorabilia
small fingers coadunate mind and world
clockmaker or cartographer
there is a reason to resist home
Wild Kingdom
The invisibility in question can just as well be described as my getting lost in the landscape: as my becoming one with it.
Edward Casey
crowded around the meat
zebras' entrails to sky
vultures neck deep at the carcass corral
if place drew one inward to this landscape
outward to book: the desert, the dust, the death
who knows the house
or neighborhood
spectacle and fear its own dwelling
this morning a deer tears across neighbor’s yard
there’s not a sound through the window to hear it
Breath
The mist stuck in your lungs, as did the landscape.
Breasts barring horizontally, in the old growth above you, belong.
Like you, forming long-term pair bonds.
You waited to wander the island with such inseparability.
The division of one heart from all others is delusion
as the natural tree hollows hold hatched young.
A catch in the throat. See also the heart leaf spring beauty,
Claytonia cordifolia—in the forest understory or streambanks.
Candy-shaped little flowers, materialize on meandering stems.
Notes
“Breath” was written for Miguel, Adria, & Magdalene Magrath (after Laynie Browne). It appeared in recorded form in Delirious Hem 2011: http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/2011/12/breath_03.html.
Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections the last will be stone, too (2013), Elements <http://www.stockportflats.org/elements.htm> (2010), and Our Parenthetical Ontology <http://www.custom-words.com/poe.html> (2008), as well as a novella in verse, Hélène <http://furniturepressbooks.com/books/poehelene/> (2012). In addition, Deborah is co-editor of Between Worlds: An Anthology of Fiction and Criticism <http://www.amazon.com/Between-Worlds-Anthology-Contemporary-Criticism/dp/1433111578> (2012) and In/Filtration: An Anthology of InnovativeHudson Valley Poetry <http://www.stationhill.org/books/title/in/filtration-(working-title):-an-anthology-of-hudson-valley-innovative-poetics> (2013). Deborah writes fiction and poetry. Her poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Handsome, Eccolinguistics, 1913, Shampoo, and Denver Quarterly. Deborah is assistant professor of English at Pace University, Westchester, and founder and curator of the annual Handmade/Homemade Exhibit <http://handhomemade.wordpress.com/> . For more information, visit http://www.deborahpoe.com.
]]>
crystalline fogged s himmer
Fragments / of / Houston S treet
his comments / were / experimental
even / the flagstones / almost / fainted
big paintings / punctuate / the body
figurative / a passing car / literalness / recoils from memory
in 90-degree rotation / color-coded / the line of her inquiry / bolder in pictorial
a / mirror reversal / light snow
mathmatical / fuguelike
sequences arranges / blotted schemas
“by gridding the pictorial field / into sequences of boxes”
she is a thin fall of snow / splayed
allover / optical / dazzle
the complete lack on meaning / overlaps / in passing cars
her degraded replication / he is rarely discussed / recurrently
more garrulous / by contrast / numbered
Nestled in the lower right corner
handmade / mechanical / intervention
in a flickering / manipulated / in solvent
the / most coherently
process and subject / the veneer of touch
44 of him / laying face down
caught in their / pers onal asides
time-capsule / astronaut s / clearer than Dante
each / fragment / without sentimentality
strobelike / magazine clippings
her postcards / her windstorms / sheen in a manner
words caught in / o’hara
“grenades wanted” / delicacy invades
men in suits / sprinkled / in the margins
map / orbit / free-ranging or thw art
the purchasable / stands in / for the artist
R&F Reds
Anne Gorrick is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of I-Formation (Book 2) (Shearsman Books, Bristol, UK, 2012), I-Formation (Book 1) (Shearsman, 2010), and Kyotologic (Shearsman, 2008). She collaborated with artist Cynthia Winika to produce a limited edition artists’ book, “Swans, the ice,” she said, funded by the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
She curates the reading series Cadmium Text, which focuses on innovative writing from in and around New York’s Hudson Valley (www.cadmiumtextseries.blogspot.com). She also co-curates the electronic poetry journal Peep/Show with poet Lynn Behrendt (www.peepshowpoetry.blogspot.com), which is a “taxonomic exercise in textual and visual seriality.”
Images of her visual art can be found here: http://theropedanceraccompaniesherself.blogspot.com/
Anne Gorrick lives in West Park, New York.
]]>Blues Poems
]]>
MIDNIGHT SPECIAL
For Huddie Lead Belly
Let the Lord work his wondrous stew
& persecute
& prosper among the heartless
At midnight the mind
places this light in the drizzle
Special laxatives
Special masquerade
Shine a light on the dikes before the morsel, the tupelos, regions behind our—
On me the sand
Plagued light
roses of insight
Before she comes the night
operates without license
To see right is wrong, right is left
The governor shows his fangs
at midnight
To free Zeus
Her man mapmaker
If you’re taken
to anticipate the lockout
Ever images
Fright
In Houston the mews are tallest
You better light a candle
& hope God is there
Do right to the petunias
encircle the pasture
The next thing you know in this synonym
this antagonism
this salvation of the softer articles
this sessification of all things plangent
Plantagenet
Prison loves
our very souls
& won’t hesitate
to commend
Let the Lord work his evil with our evil
Sunset to tense
semen to time
Midnight rains
on metal
to regulate
our sincere
soporific
Special is death
Shine a light on the broken bottle, the two-legged resuscitator, all the mattered pantana
the flagstones to breathe
the hopes/harms to sugar
On me the date
DON’T EXPLAIN
For Billie Holiday
Hush now farthing
don’t explain the ligation
Just say hoppingale
you’ll remain froward and sound
don’t explain cinches
What’s there to gain blanched choats
You know to needle
I love you enologist
I hear harnesses
folks chatter parables
I know the diamond
you cheat horseshoes
Hush now dimestores
don’t explain resuscitation
Don’t explain amazing braces
IN THE DARK
For Junior Parker
I heard the mandate covered with slime
You was parking on the median of science and sincerity
High to demonstrate the ineffable marketing
High as the difference between fortune and fame
Kissing another fellow breathes the meaty begonias
Another fellow implements the rational sutra
And you know there wasn’t any man in the true story
And you know how to crisscross markets
It wasn’t me ringing hollow
It wasn’t me before the Commission
It wasn’t me on the stork
That ain’t right to eat graphically
No no no beetles on the sock
No no no the reason for sex is love
What goes on needles
In the dark feeling
Fortresses will soon blossom
Fandangos come to light
They say sublimity
They say faraway to tell the police
You whisper momentum
Low elevators
Low psychic containers
And spending to pull up a precious egregious handful
All my dough bromides
All my tolerance a lashing
You told indiscriminate afternoons
That fellow breathes the horoscope
That fellow implements the evening sunshine
Things place the emphasis on luck
Things decree
You never told me to hesitate on the threshold
You never told me the border of neither hurts
Before dark
Before lemonade
Before onomatopoeia
That ain’t right to please the seizures and speculate against omen
That ain’t right or wrong, tall or short, thin or fat
No no no don’t placate the nostrils incense
What goes on inside the harpsichord
In the dark fleeting
Peaches will soon negate
Americas come to light
One of these days the search washes
One of these days we will escalate the imperfection
Just you wait and see the orrery
Just you wait and see the signpost interfere with destiny
Just you wait and see the beam explode into ice
Then you’ll realize the last snow lasts longest
Then you’ll realize the demand holds up
The way cancer digests
The way cancer sleeps
The way Rikers rises
You treated me to a hallucination
You treated me with sleep
You treated me greasy
That ain’t right blessed severance
That ain’t right blessed redemption of the fork
That ain’t right in the cabana solarium
No no no the matrix the Santa the costume
What goes on trucks
In the dark marauding
Lonnie will soon cancel
Images come to light
BAD LOVE
For Luther Allison
Goin’ out in a rush
of feathers
Every evenin’ the wide world
up and down
I asked her XXX
What was showin’ in military theaters
ultraviolet splendor
She said casque
and soup
I don’t even know my days
photosynthesis
Bad love works
Bad love talks
And misery eats the liver
I’m sick and tired of faucets
This secrecy blends
Came back half-electrocuted
oilstained
In the mornin’ taken by surprise
the X factor
Her hair was the signal
metal shavings
A mess synthesizes
sympathizes
Her hips volume
discount
Ashakin’ BLTs in the DZ
Shoshanna you see
She had on round nougats
Ixnay tar
A different dress brasserie
to fix polish
Bad love eats
Bad love tunnels
And misery eats the sac
I’m sick and tired of stem cells
This secrecy dust devils
Don’ wan’ the Caledonian eclipse
No mo’ lovin’ pig sauce
night brigade
She don’t even know the songbirds
thrice guitar
The reason why primary mercenaries
faint Finisterre
I asked her unambiguous doodle
toothless Suarez
’y she was lyin’ rightful grease
Tuesday’s bargain
And she broke righ’ down to the bare soil
solitary toystore
And she started to cry on the table of Worms
storms of chancelries
Bad love worships
Bad love whirls
And misery eats the swallow
I’m sick and tired of premium bananas
This woman’s secrecy impinges on the facts
Bad love homes
Bad love ropes
Bad love paces
And misery eats the word
I’m sick and tired of Morris sewing
This secrecy undulates
Bad love frames
Bad love pays
Bad love erases
And misery eats Troy
I’m sick and tired of brazen sorries
That woman’s secrecy darkens the spread
Bad love says
Bad love preys
Bad love sways
Baby XXX
I don’t want dumdums
No secrecy hams
Michael Ruby is the author of three recent poetry collections from BlazeVOX [books], the trilogy Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices just published by Station Hill Press, and the forthcoming American Songbook (Ugly Duckling Presse). He lives in Brooklyn and works as a newspaper editor.
Natural History
Through studying Photography in college I began pursuing a very specific style of Analogue photography. Due to the lighting setups involved and the kind of hairy, miserable kind of guys that populate the bands I like, this was mostly explored as live gig photography. Some examples of this are viewable over at my website (see below). Unfortunately when I achieved what I felt was a level of [ACCURACY?] with this particular technique of image making, I came to realise that no one quite liked it as much as I did so my bulky SLR was retired to the back of the wardrobe where it still sits, hoping one day to be shown the light of day and made use of again.
At some point much later, I acquired a camera phone and began taking quick snaps of elements I found in my surroundings, for reference, amusement or my own perverted idea of the 'decisive moment' that would likely make Bresson spit on me. Only in recent times has this begun to develop back into actual image making again, largely due to the kind of mobile applications that work to hide the largely inadequate quality of camera phones.
I don't see the images portrayed here as art by any means. I believe anyone with the right combination of filters, pointing a smartphone at the same object could acquire pretty much the same effect, but the reason I have decided to share them is through that perverted sense of the decisive moment I mentioned. These are fragments of the world that stuck out at me. That caught my interest. Moments of strange, unnoticed beauty I found looking back at me.
*
Illustrations & Design
www.Michael-Cowell.com : : go here.
]]>Some thoughts on time and acceptance of time, by your faithful editor, Arielle Guy
May 7, 2012
]]>First, I just want to say, thank you for everyone’s patience in waiting for this issue. And, other than that, Hallelujah! that it’s finally published! Absolutely gorgeous and moving work in this issue, I am so grateful to all of the contributors. Thank you!
* * *
This weekend, I finally wrapped up the current issue of Turntable. It didn’t even require more than the usual one cup of coffee per day. My schedule had just finally cleared enough so I had a good part of two full days to devote to posting and editing. This span of luxurious time to devote to one task was a revelation. In the past several months, I’ve fit in uploads between work deadlines and proofreading jobs and coaching appointments. I thought of time and space and downtime and uptime and whatever else kind of time and how schedules and urgencies and deadlines make up a life. It doesn’t matter how busy we are, how many hours a week we work, busy is busy. Comparing hours logged doesn’t matter. What is busy to us is busy to us and we can tune in and listen to what our own personal thresholds are. And, what I’ve found is that, even in the midst of this busiest of times I have just gone through, a breath in the middle of it all, letting myself rest even a little bit, with eyes closed and computer off, expands time in an almost miraculous way. I say “almost” because there must be some law of physics that addresses what happens when taking a pause to be aware of the present moment. Quantum dharma.
Measuring Stillness and Deep Acceptance
The beginning months of this year have been a lesson in acceptance. Acceptance isn’t partial or occluded. It is the essence of unconditional view and attitude, bearing carried through in every situation, with every person, with every thought and feeling. This kind of dedication to truth, to the underlying reality of each experience, is a skill. In some ways, it comes naturally to be where we are, to experience life in a raw and immediate way. But life teaches us to shut down, protect ourselves, place barriers between ourselves and our experience, our own thoughts and emotions. Seeing through these constructions of rules and expectations and busyness, of entanglements and denial, is a lifelong pursuit. In the pursuit, there is revelation and a constancy that can only be found in the shifting of the very ground beneath us. The paradox of acceptance and constantly shifting reality is that it cuts through to the core of experience itself—a conflagration of quantum and four-dimensional reality. The reality beyond reality, in reality, existing parallel and intertwined like DNA strands in our daily lives. The very inaccessibility and uncertainty of subatomic particles is what builds the ground under us. We are made of illuminated substance that isn’t substance at all, yet it’s tangible on levels we can’t even fathom, can’t see. The measuring and acceptance of these two seemingly conflicting states of reality is reality itself.
We deal with an ever-changing world that we try to hold steady with toothpicks, we try to keep warm with flames from small matches. It’s like trying to hold the planets in a colander. The orbits and gravity and attachment of the universe to itself is transcended by the speed of light and dying stars and black holes and dark matter, elements of reality we can’t explain fully, elements that exist and we know of their existence only by their effect on other elements. The universe is, for the most part, unknown. Our lives are, for the most part, unknown. Yet we try to build structures and schedules and goals and even dreams that sustain on the tightrope of time, emotion, flesh, and thought.
Since January, time has not gone the way I expected. Schedules have been disrupted to such a degree that whatever original plan there was dissipated into ether. I spent a lot of the last few months being angry and frustrated and worried. What I found, to my surprise, was these disturbances were only on the surface. When I went deeper, there was a beautiful silence, a steady peace, the cradle of acceptance that felt like birth itself, death itself, where all things merged into one whole piece of sustained reality. All of the science in the world, all of the psychology, coping mechanisms, clotheslines, dish strainers, family albums, house walls, pay checks, are no match for this world beyond time and space, this connection to a divine peace, a mystery that will never be solved, and in which we sit like babies on a mother’s breast. The truth of this mystery is comforting, once we get beyond the sheer terror of everything we think we know expiring into nothingness, emptiness.
How does this all relate to daily life? It has had an astounding effect on my mind and how it works, and how I think about things, and how I maneuver through my day. Stress, fear, tension, sadness, anger, joy, desire, longing all still arise, frequently, and every moment, I turn to them and, instead of interpreting or craving or distancing, I look toward them, and inquire into their nature, their feel, texture, bodily sensation, accompanying thoughts and beliefs. This inquiry was first done so I could find peace, be at peace, cultivate acceptance and comfort and relax into my life. The stage that came after this wrangling with, again, trying to pin down peace and comfort, was the deepest lesson I have ever learned in my life. I learned to be with the experience, without looking even one second ahead, with full immersion in the emotion or bodily sensation, full presence. This is a constant vigilance, one that requires awareness each moment, and a willingness to not define, predict, tell stories about, or repel or drown in any particular experience.
Our stories are powerful, seductive, compelling, melodramatic, fascinating. They make our lives into epics. The thing that is so heartbreaking is that, without these stories, we are even more heroic, more epic. Being with what is without effort, without trying to frame it, is the deepest, most powerful experience there is. We can want so desperately that our hearts feel like they will break out of our chests, feel grief so intense that it weighs our bodies down like lead, feel love so overwhelming, we shy away from it with our beliefs about relationships and intimacy, and we can train ourselves to stay. To stay with all of it, intense and overpowering as it is. This is true intimacy.
So during these first months of the year, when I have been unable to do everything I wanted, everything I set out to do on January 1st, I have been learning, slowly, achingly, how to accept this. To accept that I can’t run three businesses, see my friends, edit my arts magazine, work out, do yoga, do my dishes, breathe, walk, make coffee, cook healthy meals, open the windows, be there for my family, feel everything I am feeling, pay attention to my thoughts, meditate, look up at the stars, attend events, sleep, watch TV and have downtime, all at the same time. I have not learned how to not sleep. I have not learned how to multitask to such an efficient degree that I can get everything done faster. I have learned that I can’t do everything.
Balance is a trick of the mind. In the middle of everything, I have learned how to balance. When nothing is getting done and I am ridiculously behind on everything, I have learned how to balance. What are my priorities, what are the real quality activities I want to do, where is my energy highest, deepest, most rooted?
I think about those little atoms dancing and the beautiful, unpredictable electrons, neutrons, and protons, quarks and unknown subatomic particles dancing, and moving, never knowing where they will move toward, never even knowing where they are, and there is amazing and awe-inspiring hope and openness there. The very nature of physical reality is built on a movement so unknown, it becomes a stable ground for us to understand and feel and live toward. We live on this earth and can feel physical earth beneath our feet, air in our lungs, our heartbeats and senses and the experience of light and darkness, fear and pain, ecstasy and faith, and it is all of apiece. It is a whole, the cradle of which is deep reality, immediate presence, and constant shifting, movement that is so constant, it holds stillness within it. In this, there is peace and we can develop skill to stay there. Stay there and work with accepting each experience exactly as it is. This is being true to ourselves, to our lives, to our experience. This discipline leaves no room for denial or interpretation or prediction. This loyalty to our experience, every moment, obliterates any lie, any protective mechanism, survival skill, learned resistance and distancing from ourselves and others and life and death. This is divine and wondrous. In each new moment, there is each new moment. Balancing this out with getting chores done, striving for goals, forming relationships is the essence of truth—in all of these pursuits lies the very nature of reality itself. It’s about how we approach our lives. We can stand open and vulnerable to our lives, letting our thoughts pass, working with our resistance and compulsion, and holding steady, heart engaged, releasing our stories, letting ourselves fully experience our lives, without trying to change them.
]]>Cut paper
]]>
Molly McIntyre is a Brooklyn-based artist, illustrator and educator. Her work deals with tenderness, vulnerability and the desire to be a better person. She employs motifs and materials familiar to her own life, in the belief that the specific connects us as much as the universal. Her work has been shown in Philadelphia, New York, Maine, Washington, California, and Mito City, Japan.
]]>
rob mclennan’s Glengarry and C, and Jennifer H. Fortin’s Mined Muzzle Velocity
]]>
rob mclennan’s Glengarry
rob mclennan’s new book Glengarry (Talonbooks) is both visceral and concrete. Glengarry appears as a three section wonder that in my reading of it, I experienced as a triptych. Not just three-fold but held together by hinges. The two hinges that held the triplicate together for me were place and body, and they allowed the whole of Glengarry to be a sort of art for me. I will speak about both place and body in a blended way throughout this review. My intent is to reveal how these two hinges work together (enacting Glengarry) in a communal way in order to hold the book together from the inside out.
Part of the triptych feeling certainly came from the aesthetics of the poems. Dripping from themselves--but in a clear and calculated way. Like rain dripping from an aerial gutter that has just reached its max. Addition of drips making drips leak. It is raining right now as I write this. Rain that makes the sky look like a shadow. I think about apparatuses that can fill to a max. That have an end point. I think about what it is to extrude beyond an end point. Is Glengarry just such type of apparatus? Does it have an end point? Or is it the extrusion beyond an end point? What is it for an it to spill over from within itself? Is it possible that spilling over can be an activism? Oh “many-splendoured” wake!
To spill over as an activism.
In this book there is something that emerges from what feels to me like a gestural admixing (on the part of mclennan) of the details considered to be history. Prior to reading this book I thought of history as something fixed--as frustration. As site that would always indelibly remain past tense. However while reading through Glengarry’s sections (glengarry: open field, “whiskey jack” and avalanche”) I was struck by the way that through continual threading of the materialities of mclennan’s history (“beyond the darkening side of trees/ beyond the county line”) into other aspects of that history’s materiality (“the junkyard alive”) what emerged was a different (torqued?) site (not necessarily past tense “push of seasons; on,/ unending”) from which to proceed in the considerations and meditations. For perhaps “if you know where the history, happened” you can begin to unravel how to hone that history into home.
Perhaps it is engagement or method (threading) that turns history into home. By way of a process of honing? What generally are the differences between history and home? Does one or the other emancipate us more? Destroy us more? Make us more mute to ourselves? Add to our vividity?
Glengarry often made me wonder about how to be a conduit for transductions of (or conflations of) place. How to be part of an obsession regarding history and home but to do so by way of an awareness of the unavoidability of fractured frames? I see Glengarry’s poems themselves as fractured frames. I see some of the lines in the book as fractured frames (“to become one/ a hardened break” or “think you/ in my standing stall/ a testament/ to all the weather we lived”)—fractured in that they do not enact any singular image—fractured in the way that they move rhythmically. With hard jolts of consonants against smoother mouth and ear shapes (the smoothness of “to become one” against the hard “k” in “a hardened beak”) or how the inner workings work with slanted rhyming (“in my standing stall” to “a testament/ to all”).
“I sometimes talk about my home, my point of origin, as though it isn’t there anymore.” Perhaps this is what we must do if we want to galvanize any given (birth or context) origin for a more animate and current version of origin. This current version--no doubtedly one that we would have to have our hands in. Hence the gestural admixture I see mclennan enacting (mentioned earlier in this review) as one of this book’s main strengths.
I feel that in this book home is “a resolve marked by passion.” A commitment. A shifting and a staying. A site where mclennan and his characters (“partner”, “children”, “her”, “our grandma”, “ex-wife” “the very taste of iron you”, etc.) can interact and interject. Can deepen the myriad landscapes for the sake of a reversal of “can you ever go home again?”--for some sort of guarantee that we are in fact in a home that is our own.
In the multiple times I read Glengarry, I kept thinking of calculated leakage becoming solid flow. I felt Glengarry materialize itself in the ways that “a river is always certain.” A river that is actually capable of never stopping. This river mixes. It reconfigures. It flows over cracks, crags, boulders--borders.
* * *
Creative Engagement with rob mclennan’s C. (LRL, 2011)
mclennan’s new LRL chap “C.” is a masterful blend of mysterious motion and non-normative meta-narratives of the quotidian (“the lights in human form”). With subtle repetition of objects of human sentiment (“figs […] artichoke hearts”) which roots us in the physicalities of planar existence on Earth) as well as with a sort of slipping in of philosophically and compositionally profound phrases (“I wanted change/ to not break; narrative,/ thick and strange” / “titled; sad/ phonetics”), we are taken by this book’s gentle whirling.
It is as if, for a time, we are enacting dervish-spins around unforeseeable derivatives (“a spherical notion/ sometimes a great theory/ of untuned strings”) and that act, motion and location is how we find our relation or home here.
What could be more inductive of connection between the quotidian and mystery, than a “constant renovation”? mclennan takes us into “combined reflection”—a place where there do not seem to be ultimates but instead, so much upturning (“threadbare/ caked in ash”). Here I feel like we are digging up “symbols [] to turn [] angles/ to action” finding ways to “live/ beyond each limit.”
* * *
Jennifer H. Fortin’s Mined Muzzle Velocity
In Jennifer H. Fortin’s Mined Muzzle Velocity, we learn firsthand how “impairment / can alter how we increase.” Fortin has compiled a book of fragments and connections in postcard form. The postcard as base for both the analytical and the intimate information included in the book is felt as a stricture. A beneficial impairment. A tightness that holds us in and to it until we leak. We burst forth. We emanate beyond stricture. Is that not what postcards are for? To bleed on or to weep on or to leave our very individual fingerprints on as we read them while we are cutting meat?
This work is not a memoir. I am not even sure if it is memory anymore. Fortin explains (in an interview with Nate Pritts (also at Lowbrow Press, http://www.lowbrowpress.com/prittsfortininterview.html) that “it felt natural and necessary to cannibalize my written memories, to feed them air again.” Are memories that have been fed air (toward new livelihoods) even memories anymore? Or are they unforeseen autonomies?
I felt a very strong awareness while reading Fortin’s book, that if these postcards came to me in the mail and not in book form it would be difficult to ensure that they ever stay as a collective. Fortin tells us “subsets can be beautiful” and I agree—therefore I find that as I encounter this book, I am somehow pleasantly caught between wanting the postcards to remain collective (ensured by their remaining in book form), and needing them to be able to be separated. Lost. Made somehow disparate to one another—to become subsets. This means I am going to print the PDF copy of the book that Fortin sent me so I can separate and regroup the postcards. Perhaps even a need to tear the pages out of the paperbound copy of the book when it arrives in my mailbox.
“I think of a postcard as a sideways / call to action.” Yes. Mined Muzzle Velocity is “a sideways / call to”. An echo resounding powerfully in a glass of milk. A wrist bleeding gray. A collection of Technicolor graphs superimposed over black and white photographs of unnamed fields. I see “a sideways call” as always somehow bent. Tilted. Strange. But all the while provoking.
Now, regarding “action” (as in “a postcard as a sideways call to action”) this book is wild with various actions. Actions of interactive mind between the speaker and its “yous,” locational/geographical action: “What do you think of the statue?” and ephemeral or dream-like action: “the non-trees between other trees.” When WE are engagements of such “sideways call to action” we must “Resort to / the eyes on the sides of [our] head.” I see the method of engagement (the commitment when reading this book) as a swerve being met by a swerve. This is how we must give. By filling in the blanks. By trusting the gaps. I am saying that as we read the postcards (which are enacting by way of and within us) we are changed. We are charged. Heated.
How to share when the aspects of one’s action are inherently disparate? Fortin speaks about the creation of the “Dear” in these postcards as act toward touch—“leaning particularly hard on the consistency of the addressed ‘Dear. (And when one is anywhere but home—hey, but also when one IS at home—isn’t there inevitably a missing Dear you want to share some things with?)” What is most intriguing to me re the composition of said “Dear” is the way that what must be relayed (because it is what of text is included in the postcards) is not necessarily erotic intimacy—is instead a motley of quotidian details, praxis, sensation, chatter, species feeling, yearning, proposition, etc. It is as if what is created in the “Dear” is a closeness, but one that could be a kinship or an emotio-spiritual proximity as much as it could be a lover. And all the while the speaker says “I’ll show you / everything or as much as I can.” There is a sort of admittance here between the speaker and the “Dear” that implies that there are limits (“as much as I can”) to what can be shared. I as a reader am curious about where the limits come from. Are they translation (of emotional extant into linear articulations) limits? Are they limits based on keeping others’ secrets? “To encase but not to enumerate”?
Fortin goes on to say “I’ve shied away from trying to imagine real places if I can’t see them myself—I don’t like constructing fuzzy versions of things.” It is important to note that in the articulation of this real version of things (articulate of Fortin’s experiences while in Bulgaria) we do in fact (by duration of taking in the postcards) get a “fuzzy version of things.” The way information is given and information is left out. The way that we “witness grazing wild” both partially belonging and partially not belonging. Dizzy with details and with disparateness. I see in this book a subtle energy toward helping to be “separate from the outside while inside” and while Mined Muzzle Velocitydoes divulge itself with honesty and formal precisions, it also in my opinion allows us as readers to be unable to complete it. “Have I shown you the real skeleton key / I have? It is filed but opens no real locks.”
j/j hastain lives in Colorado, USA with xir beloved. j/j is the author of numerous cross-genre works previously published and forthcoming (a few of which are): prurient anarchic omnibus (Spuyten Duyvil), long past the presence of common (Say it with Stones), a womb-shaped wormhole (BlazeVox), treOOA(with Eileen Tabios/ Marsh Hawk Press). j/j’s writing has appeared in numerous journals including Trickhouse, Vlak, Big Bridge, The Offending Adam, Dear Sir, Eccolinguistics, EOAGH, Aufgabe, Queerocracy Art, Masculine Femininities, Caketrain, Plath Profiles, Bombay Gin and PANK The Queer Issue. j/j is currently in the process of curating an Anthology of Queer Nudes (Knives Spoons and Forks Press, 2013) and has helped curate (and participated in) two major Trans anthologies. j/j is an Elective Affinities participant, a member of Dusie kollektiv, writes for Lit Pub and is a regular contributor to Sous Les Paves. j/j currently writes creative reviews for Big Other, Jacket2 and Emprise Review. j/j’s work has was appeared in a Queer-focused show at the Leslie-Lohman Annex in New York. j/j’s books have been finalists in the Kelsey Street, Grey Book Press, Grace Notes Books, Switchback, Omnidawn, DIAGRAM and Ahsahta book and essay competitions. j/j’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Publishers Triangle. j/j’s manuscript extant shamanisms won the Pavement Saw poetry award. j/j’s manuscript dear secondary umbilical, won second place in the Mad Hatter’s Wild and Wyrd Poetry Contest. In 2011 j/j’s book we in my Trans was nominated for the Stonewall Book Award and j/j’s book prurient anarchic omnibus was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.
]]>
Jamie Townsend's MATRYOSHKA, Edward Smallfield's Equinox
]]>
MATRYOSHKA
Jamie Townsend
8$ US
Houston TX: little red leaves, 2011
reviewed by rob mclennan
1. must mean something
for words
a lateral prop a
shunt –
rather to watch streaming
video delay
in evenings
East Kensington, Philadelphia poet Jamie Townsend's second chapbook, MATRYOSHKA (Houston TX: little red leaves, 2011), on the heels of his STRIP/HALO, is part of Dawn Pendergast's little red leaves textile series, “lovingly sewn using recycled curtains and other textile remnants.” Townsend's small, graceful and enviable chapbook is a binary poem, each page with two pieces, an “I” and an “O,” with a weave of punctuated paper swirls, tiny needle holes, swirling between.
O. fiber art pictorial
cross rooftops
nonesuch remnant
weather projections
overlaid strands
satellite updates
bold formulations
A sequence of meditative bursts, patters and patterns slowly emerge in these small pieces, weaving their sharp way across a subtle scope. Townsend seems capable of quite a lot in such a small space, a small canvas, packing much into his wonderments. As Michael Cross writes in a recent blog posting, quoting poet/critic Brenda Iijima, on Townsend's chapbook (June 9, 2011, disinhibitor.blogspot.com):
The poems are totally elemental (down to the binary "1" and "0" headings) in that the language seems to register phenomena in the body while processing it ("rendering" it?) on the page (as if the chapbook were a sense organ). Townsend uses tons of nouns in these short bursts, which contribute, I think, to the haptic weight of each page. And Dawn Pendergast's INCREDIBLE design work (including some super delicate sewing on every page) further adds to the language's material presence. Little Red Leaves co-editor Ash Smith writes of MATRYOSHKA: "The title...denotes famous Russian nesting dolls, and yet the subtle physics and physicality of such poems which attend to "sub-dermal termites scattering" reveal that such momentary nesting is in fact a station in orbit." Indeed.
* * *
Equinox
Edward Smallfield
US $15.95, 92 pages
Berkeley, CA: Apogee Press, 2011
reviewed by rob mclennan
ciao, Marcello
On a bridge
in a country of cars
on the radio from afar
an edge
you had crossed over a wedge
Life is a lure
& through the half-open doors
in hotel hallways the black & white almost measures
Something is always beginning or ending The water
in all the fountains in Rome has stopped
The flashbulbs & balloons have popped
Life is a feather
who On the radio
, ciao
When I first saw some of the pieces that make up appear in American ex-pat Edward Smallfield's Equinox (2011) in an issue of New American Writing, I was immediately taken with his cadence, the edge and the flow of how each short poem stretches across the page, reminiscent of Canadian poet Jay Millar's brilliant chapbook-sequence Sporadic Growth: being a third season of 26 fungal threads (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2006).. In three sections—Memoir, Solstice and Elegy—Smallfield's Equinoxis constructed out of lively, single-page meditations that dance across the stretches of family, history, travel, music, painting and literature, including small poems-as-essays on (and sometimes from/after) Catullus, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams, Billie Holiday, New York City, Vivaldi, Archilochos and Jorge Luis Borges. A number of these names even return a few times, in subsequent pieces. As the notes at the back of the collection suggest, the pieces exist not only as small essays, but plunder the language of other writers and other works, weaving into the poems to stretch his language even further, with a listing of many of the poems with names and/or titles following, perhaps even suggesting further directions to add breadth to the reading. There is something of the “day book” to Smallfield's pieces, writing poems-as-daily-practice, a quality of daily contemplation through poems, and Denise Newman, in her back cover blurb, refers to these as “floating notes,” which I quite like.
The publisher/editor of Berkeley's impressive Apogee Press, Barcelona-based Smallfield's publishing history has but only a few titles over the past seventeen years, from The Pleasures of C (Apogee Press, 2001), Trio (Specter Press, 1995) and the collaborative One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (with Doug MacPherson; Battery Press, 2003), to the collaborative chapbook locate(with Miriam Pirone; dancing girl press, 2008), but if any of those are even close to the thoughtful quality of Equinox, they might all be required.
Bilbao
cool
along the river the morning hulls
rust in the water shells
abandoned after the tools:
erosion years caracoles
logarithm arithmetic the null
set oxidizes the hills
cling to the road time's fool
cows & sheep
a few horses
the discourse
= silence = sleep
the show is always about to start
oh, now furniture is a work of art
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), kate street (Moira, 2011) and 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) (Obvious Epiphanies, 2010), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.
]]>Poems
]]>
Decoration Day
going, and sounding, how, gathering
and again
a putting into place, a following
or similar. A
turning back, to an end. In arrival
or disposition
in measure, in picture
are several, having one, and, role
according, as, is an end.
As high is far or near, or, save to say
in such a case, are all, are, similar
Are all, are, an end
and so on. And ever so, to
part or like.
Blue Glass
or, the less, how less. the hand can see.
certain prejudices or disturbances,
in theme and in rehearsal. the hand can see.
in kind and in degree,
certain tools and purposes, in pairs or in threes
hidden, and in kind. And visited, the one.
out of number, or rub, or band or bese
the tendency.
enough, or, inasmuch. And visited, the one.
and how, the hand can see, to spare and to return
the color
to rise, or, proper to. to rise or to surpass
and how,
in demonstration, the point is to the line
Rummy
by fiat, or consent
a, redemption, or, liberation
the, goings and comings of locations
the, knowing of a kind
both resident and remote.
or, that of two, one should arrive.
in silence, in ceremony
both resident and remote.
the figure of a wheel.
or,
one’s intended. destination.
falls.
parade.
the exile, in hospital
the exile, in studio
the exile, in shepherd
Canteen
of one to one, is said
or
epic letters
are come to rescue said assertions
one above and one below
to the left, or
face to face
but do not be, a pair, a
parallel and unexpected giving, to
or
in belief
as late as, so, to, merits an assertion, runs
in unexpected pairs, in relations
or,
as in relations.
Say,
in relation, or alike.
And so to cease, or parry.
so, to, cease or closet or border a routine
or
length, but do not be, a pair
a parallel and unexpected giving, to
or,
in belief
Boat
in hand, or, to receive
any person, at all
and so,
sufficiently able. Day
or
wishing to take on, himself
of others,
with affection, and the future.
Or,
in a prosperity
those, who are at variance
and partly to befall
an invective
whatever lies, we can from those who know
is not concealed
but as it is, and it is, from anywhere
it will be
that it is. Mannahatta
admit the bearer
to understand, each thing, is
we know nothing
but according to, and of, but according to
and of, those, upon
of that upon, those, or, how
and in one’s own, book
sounding, again, impossible book
A rod or hook or sleeve
for, it is, how, to doubling, and halving
such as arises, after
or, such as setting out, by lot
are given
or by lot, by toss, and sleeve. And so
sufficiently able
and virtue can, or cannot, serve as dicast
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino writes at his blog, The Postmodern Romantic, and edits the online poetry journal, E·ratio.