Wednesday, July 21, 2010

atmospheric





From Fragments of a Broken Poetics
by Jennifer Moxley

VII

What does it matter if there are poets or poems?

XI

In poetry, as elsewhere, nature isn't what it used to be.

XII

The poem resists. It resists coming into being. It resists eloquence.

It resists transmitting unpleasant or embarrassing knowledge.

It resists grammatical constraints. It resists moving away from simple utterance.

It resists revision. It resists completion. It resists success. Hopefully, the poet resists as well.

XLI

After a point, even the poem can grow bored with its own devices.

XLII

It seems as if the able use of metaphor has precipitously fallen off since doubt was cast upon language's ability to represent the real, and yet simile, a far less interesting trope, somehow continues to thrive.

VIII

The idea of audience is a nuisance born of the need for spectacle. Poems haunting the precarious dialectic between existence and extinction do not need it. Their magic is dependent on the private experience of separate individuals.

XV

The poet must understand seduction, because even capricious human attention is susceptible to courtship.



Friday, July 16, 2010

news



I received some good news recently.
(but never know quite how to go about
"sharing" in here. Write it/duh.)

I was selected to be one of three inaugural
fellows at the new Purchase College Writers Center
this coming fall.
I'm amazed and pleased and surprised
and have already reorganized my summer reading.
Soon a new notebook. Maybe a new pen!
I have a manuscript that needs serious fixing.
And a new project/book/something underway.
I get some space and time and, most wonderfully, a research library.
This all makes me very happy.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Fire


by Anthony Discenza


sale today. Enough with all
this talk about words.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

tropical



Bluet or cornflower or centaurea cyanus
nevermind it's the color oh and the heat again.

How could all the shreds of garbage bags stuck
in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping
over every shanty and fish stand in the world,
be, in essence, the fingerprints of God?
Maggie Nelson, BLUETS

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

frida



It's hot here-a heat weave,
I keep writing.
And it's Frida Kahlo's birthday.
In her honor this door and her words.

I would like to be able to do whatever I want behind
the curtain of "madness." In this way, I would arrange
flowers, all day, I would paint pain, love, tenderness,
I would freely laugh at others, but above everything
I would laugh at myself. I would build my world
that would be mine and theirs as long as I live.