a pound of flesh

I would have been assigned to thinking gratuitously were it not for the stale naked flesh already in my vision. Instead  I will swear on a grave, fuck, shit, moan and see how you like it. You don't like it. I can tell. Ok. another strategy is to ignore the explicit and tend toward sweeter imagery, like scents and shaded nuance. A map, a predetermined round of luck. I have read a book in which the colors vibrate, photos tell a story of crumbled architecture, a literal metaphor for our current times. This of course has nothing to do with stale flesh but I am trying to ignore that at the moment. It sounds like putrid political banter or the empty jargon of men with shiny teeth and photogenic hair. Get on this page, interface that, let's iterate. Stinking discourses of the mainstream. And none of us is outside, huddled together in this center of privileged misery. This is why the poets turn romantic or lean into narrative confessionalism. Dear Sharon Olds, tell us the story of your grandmother again. Sigh. We want catharsis within rational means. Don't make me emote beyond my capacity. This is exactly why fresh flesh works best. The purely physical denotation cannot be dismissed or set on the side of interpretation. Oh Susan Sontag yes it is still always about interpretation. And we are getting worse at it. The leaves of intellect falling into spaces of settling concrete, sidewalks paving over our deepest insights. Dear Susan Sontag the photo has been altered my hopes have been altered the image is just finally so clear. Dear Charles artifice is simply for the sake of artifice and we will absorb. We are sponges. Playing on slick surfaces and shiny baubles. We love letters printed without serif and cartoons that depict the genuine stereotypes of real people. We want our lesson with our oatmeal maybe even dashed with raisins. Our news with the flash. Our memories like polariods, developing into clarity before our eyes. The poetry has become political, music lullabies like sedatives, painting what one does with one's house after too much deliberation. If gratuitous means explicit then let's be clear. I no longer wonder as I wander but I whimper and strain. The rainbow papers and obstructive justice are only like the sweet icy desserts, after a long winter, in which each individual flake of snow is still falling, frozen in space and time.

dear Muriel

ok, dear Muriel

your labor and democratic possibility

a poem of love or politics or balancing each discreet

image (fluttering, on the breeze)

I can tell you that I’ve wondered this myself

the array of conspicuous nature

the nature of

a decided concrete layering

of linguistic suggestion

in shades of pastoral, modified

for these new times

union of sentiment, sediment

chiseling against winter

dear Muriel, I am on your road

distinct trace, a flight of ambitious

optimism, each wing lifting in its turn

tradition of this machine, grammatical

economy of flight and return, continuous

reminder, dust settling and blown away.

subversive publishing

this is a fun project... kind of like the assignment I give students at the end of the semester, but no one has quite taken it this far...

http://carpediemcollaborators.tumblr.com/

from The Way of Imagination

by Scott Russell Sanders

We cannot know for certain how our actions will affect our descendants or

our fellow species, but science helps us make an informed projection; we cannotknow unerringly the right way to act, but compassion offers us the surest guide.No matter how clear the evidence from science and the testimony from ethics,however, if we are to grapple with climate disruption and other global crises,we also need the active sympathy and imaginative energy aroused in us by art.To be sure, much recent art discourages us from imagining a “more perfect”world. Turn on television, visit the cinema, or open a best-selling novel andyou’re likely to encounter stories about people stalking, robbing, murdering, orotherwise harming one another. You’ll meet far more narcissists than altruists,more desperadoes than healers, more warriors than peacemakers. That popularart deals in such fare is not surprising. Physical threats seize our attention, forobvious evolutionary reasons. Strife and destruction are more dramatic than

harmony or healing. In art, as in politics, fear is easier to evoke than hope.

But the greatest art, while acknowledging the world’s brokenness and our

own flaws, conveys glimpses of a potential wholeness, in ourselves and in theworld. One of our names for that tantalizing wholeness is beauty. Glimpsing it in poetry or pottery, hearing it in symphonies or songs, we long to makesomething beautiful ourselves, to lead more beautiful lives.

We yearn to walk in beauty, as the Navajo say. Great art reveals that

beauty is not a superficial trait but the expression of a fundamental force 
running through the cosmos, including our own depths. This is a healing 
force,manifest in the way scattered elements gather into stars, debris 
from super-novas gathers into organisms, organisms form communities—
and in the way

our two-legged kind shapes Earth’s materials into art. What we call

imagination

is a human expression of the shaping force at work in the universe.

The universe was not fashioned all at once, with its present distribution

of species and stars. It has unfolded over billions of years and is unfolding 
still,and so is our understanding of how it works and what our role in it 
might be.Everything we presently behold, no matter how far-flung and 
scattered it mayappear, is part of a single flow that generates new forms—
forms that cohere forshorter or longer periods and then give way to new, 
generally more complexones. On Earth, at least, this dynamic unity has 
produced organisms capableof responding to the creativity of the universe 
with creations of their own. Wepaint and sing and dance and write because 
we are moved by the artfulness ofnature. We can perceive the deep affinity 
between the glaze on a bowl and theiridescence of a butterfly’s wing, 
between a ballerina’s pirouette and the swirlof a spiral galaxy. In light of 
our gifts, it is neither impractical nor utopian forus to imagine leading 
more beautiful lives, forming a more perfect society, oralleviating the 
suffering and fostering the happiness of strangers not yet born.

Like the universe, we are still unfolding. What we become, what we make of

ourselves and our world, will be shaped by many factors, but by none more

powerful than imagination.

creative essay by Dinty Moore

this is lovely, strong, maybe disturbing...

Dinty Moore:  Buried Alive

You can layer me under mud, silt, and soil when I die. You can bury me flat beneath the glorious weight of the sweet-scented earth. Leave me to the industrious earthworms. Let the tree roots have their way. Return my worn body to the oozing, teaming, elemental sludge.

          Or actually, why wait?

          Any Saturday afternoon in April, or May, sometimes late March depending on the thaw, you will find me crawling on my knees, in my garden, ripping away dead plants, scooping clumps of sweet wet soil, digging through the cold, rich dirt like some sort of hairless bear searching for grubs. A hairless bear who just happens to wear thick eyeglasses and muck-covered t-shirts. A hairless bear that grunts, whistles, and occasionally speaks. “Damn, look at those fat worms.”

          I am at my happiest in these grubby moments, elbow deep in primordial soil. I adore the feel of the dirt pressed into my palms, packed between my fingers, coating my forearms up to the elbow. When my denim jeans are spackled, my socks mud-soggy, my forehead speckled, my hair a mop head covered with spider webs, leaves, and twigs, I am content. In this mock burial, oddly, I feel most alive.

         There are people, more respectable than I, who tend to their orderly vegetable beds while standing on two legs. These upright people have long-handled rakes and hoes, pristine gardening outfits, sunburn-prevention hats. They have straight backs. Gardening carts. Cool glasses of iced tea often rest by their left elbow, a beautiful bit of condensation forming along the smooth rim.

          I see them, in catalogs and magazines, but I cannot understand them. Gardening in that manner would be like trying to raise an infant from behind a pane of glass.

          Perhaps I’m descended from the Neanderthals, the group that lost out to the cunning Cro-Magnons back in prehistoric times when the latter figured out tools and fighting implements more quickly than the former. My people were simple folks: they liked hopping around, touching things with their hands.

          Or maybe my ancestral line slinks muddily down from one of those bog bodies in the National Museum of Ireland, murdered and dropped into the muck two-thousand years ago, sacrifices intended to mark important tribal boundaries. It would be an honor of sorts, except for the being murdered part.

          The peat bog muck is cold, acidic, oxygen-free, and mummified the sad bog bodies, prevented their decay. So we can see Old Croghan man and Clonycavan man today, a bit worse for wear, leathery and brown, but whole still, on display in Dublin.

          I visited just last year, and they seemed startled to be out there in the open air.

          I own tools: a garden rake, a hoe, two shovels, a trowel, a wicked-looking weed extractor. I often drag them from my garage, back to the garden, on Saturday mornings, and then promptly forget them entirely, abandoning them three rows behind as I crawl through the miniature jungle, working with the tools given me at birth.

          Show me some dirt and what I do is get dirty.

          My garden is marked by its imperfections, uneven rows, impetuous plantings, and even the occasional propagated moment of herbal wit. I speculate sometimes as to why I prefer the rough, erratic garden: an attempt at justifying my own imperfect life, perhaps? If these peppers can thrive so can I.

          And the soil I am clawing into, after all, is soil made from the scraps of my own consumption; the clay I found seven years ago augmented by composted coffee grounds, egg shells, banana peels, avocado skins, carrots, onions, squash, and lettuce. When I am digging, I am digging through the detritus of my life. That’s me down there.

          Digging my grave.

in april one believes in rain in dogs in the long walk from one implication to another political commitment. yesterday i drank beer. this is all to say that in the event that our schools fail that the politicians deconstruct from the inside out that lines on the sidewalk gap and crumble while some of us pander and shiver in corners, that the sprouts continue to shoot. i have noticed strong green plants minimally sticking themselves out of the dirt. some of them shoot further and then fall over. some of them get chewed out and spat aside. the squirrels in my yard are like michigan legislators, uneducated, uncaring, and utterly destructive. oh sorry was that a straightforward metaphorical political commentary? margaret thatcher lives in the neighborhood in the form of a possum. but maybe that is unfair to the possum. it's ugly and has weird eyes but it hasn't caused any trouble like hate and reckless disregard for the most vulnerable in society. if it has babies under my porch though that may be a different story. the dog is like obama... sometimes assertive and in control of her actions... sometimes a pain in my ass. the old people and the sad people are always at a loss. no one lives to be 87 anymore anyway... oh wait, they live to be 102 and married for 100 years. who could stand it? doesn't biology tell us people are the only ones who claim to be monogamous but really aren't all that they claim? the penguins don't mate for life and morgan freeman is telling a fabricated narrative that makes us all feel better about our constructed heterosexual world. biology is changing. we are on the cusp of new spring directions. we are queer. we are shaded in colors and sound. in the rain i can tell you the scent of disappointment lingers and then slaps the ground. trees are moments of opportunity. leaves imagine like lennon. i want to lay  my head back against the cushion of repercussions but instead i pretend to continue, in this vain, and intuit where to go next. if you have depression there are 21 steps for thinking about it. they may or not help you believe in anything but try walking one step with each step and see where it leads you. i can tell you that in april one may straddle the line between depression and not depression simply according to the size of the sigh, the elevation of resource, an intention toward scorched muscles. i can also tell you that this is only one start to an otherwise unruly manner. in the rain there is a dampening or an acceleration. it depends on the rate at which your profession is disappearing. like prevallet's father like the words on the page, a volume of redacted syllables.

this thing that i am doing

it doesn't matter what you say about it because i am doing this thing. this thing that i am doing is better than most things that you have done. i have a thing and i am doing it and whatever you say in response or as advice or to criticize or to be speaking out loud with no particular point is not relevant to me. you see i have been working in this direction toward this thing and you have been lounging on the beach. or in your head. or outside of any particular thinking. i have warned you that when this is in motion i will continue moving and you will be left aside still unlearning or unimpressed. this thing that i am doing is beyond your capacity. have you thought about your capacity? it is dismal. and there are not comments enough. so when you say i don't give you comments it's because there aren't comments enough. and your capacity is dismal. so you might as well continue to produce in your way outside of comments or optimism. this is not a utopia. if you already know everything than you can create your own world of rules and stories and work. but this is something else. if it were utopia you would be happier. or i would want to talk to you more. we would share comments. we would both move toward more. but you are writing the same sentence repeatedly. one copy after another. the same structure and vocabulary every time. why did you even come here in the first place with only one sentence? this thing that i am moving toward is layered with many kinds of sentences. short and long with varying amounts of adjectives and expletives. sometimes lovely images sometimes abstract concepts. nothing repeats unless it is utterly intentional. as this thing continues to move even the intentional becomes layered and unpredictable. the unpredictable becomes its own thing. and i just follow that. and make comments. and add new sentences. and take longer walks in every direction. sometimes i cross hills and sometimes i circle around. you have never encountered a hill that you didn't turn away from. and head back. toward your same sentence your one word your single idea. it's hard to say it is what you do best. best is not the right word. but the vocabulary is so limited. what you do is motivate me to do this thing that i am doing. regardless of your childish complaints. and maybe in spite of.

EMU Department of English Language and Literature Undergraduate Scholarships

The applications for our English Department undergraduate scholarships are due on Wednesday.

Department of English Language and Literature Undergraduate Scholarships

Irene Little Wallace Scholarship (Excellence, Need, Majors):  This scholarship comes with a minimum, one-time award of $500.  We will be able to award this scholarship to at least five students in Winter 2013.  Students applying for the award must be undergraduate students in the Department of English Language and Literature (any program area) with a GPA of at least 3.0 and demonstrated financial need (can be a line or two description in the essay).   Applications are due in hard-copy to the English Department in Pray-Harrold (6^th Floor) and should be directed to the attention of Professor Melissa Jones.  Students who do not receive the award upon first application are encouraged to resubmit.  Deadlines for submission are listed below.  To apply, a student must submit the following:

·         Coversheet including:

Full Name and e-mail address

Student Number

Local Address

Permanent Address

Local Phone Number

Permanent Phone Number

·         A one-page summary of the following information:

Major

Class Level

Cumulative GPA

GPA in Major

Current Enrollment Hours

Planned Enrollment Hours Next Semester

·         A short essay describing academic and professional goals and achievements, including a statement showing evidence of financial need (500-700 words).  

Deadline for Winter 13 award: Wednesday, March 27, 2013.

Mariam Turbin Scholarship (University or Community Service, Majors and Minors): This scholarship comes with a one-time award of approximately $200.  Students applying for the award must be declared undergraduate majors or minors in the Department of English Language and Literature (any program area), must have a minimum GPA of 3.0, and must demonstrate leadership in University or community activities.  Applications are due in hard-copy to the English Department in Pray-Harrold and should be directed to the attention of Professor Melissa Jones.  Students who do not receive the award upon first application are encouraged to resubmit.  Deadlines for submission are listed below.  To apply, a student must submit the following:  

                                                   

·         Coversheet including:

Full Name and e-mail address

Student Number

Local Address

Permanent Address

Local Phone Number

Permanent Phone Number

·         A one-page summary of the following information:

Major

Class Level

Cumulative GPA

GPA in Major

Current Enrollment Hours

Planned Enrollment Hours Next Semester

·         A short essay describing the student’s leadership activities and the place of service in his or her life.

Deadline for Winter 13 award: Wednesday, March 27, 2013.

Madalene and Jack McClow Memorial End Scholarship (Teaching, Need, Majors or Minors): This scholarship comes with a one-time award of $1,000.  Students applying for the award must be declared undergraduate majors or minors in the Department of English Language and Literature (any program area), must have a minimum GPA of 3.0, must have demonstrated financial need, and must be seeking a teaching certificate.  Preference will be given to students who are preparing to enter their final semester and will be doing their student teaching in the fall.  Applications are due in hard-copy to the English Department in Pray-Harrold and should be directed to the attention of Professor Melissa Jones.  Students who do not receive the award upon first application are encouraged to resubmit.  Deadlines for submission are listed below.  To apply, a student must submit the following:  

                                                   

·         Coversheet including:

Full Name and e-mail address

Student Number

Local Address

Permanent Address

Local Phone Number

Permanent Phone Number

·         A one-page summary of the following information:

Major

Class Level

Cumulative GPA

GPA in Major

Current Enrollment Hours

Planned Enrollment Hours Next Semester

·         A short statement describing the student’s teaching goals and financial need (the latter can be a brief description of self-sufficiency, dependence on loans and work study, etc). 

Deadline for Winter 13 award: Wednesday, March 27, 2013.

some thoughts on Rukeyser/Symposium

In 1977 Audre Lorde spoke of poetry “as a revelatory distillation of experience.” “For women,” Lorde explained, “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives” (Sister Outsider 37).

Muriel Rukeyser seemed to understand these ideas when she began publishing her poems in the 1930s, and clearly attests to in the Life of Poetry published in (1949). The flyer for the Rukeyser symposium includes the quote “Breathe in experience, Breathe out poetry.” What you may or not already know is that this is actually the first line in the first poem in her first published book, Theory of Flight. Rukeyser absolutely begins and ends in a poetics of experience, a practice in which poems are carved from the experiences of our lives. I think for Lorde and for Rukeyser this begins with the personal, and over their bodies of work opens, or transcends the personal.

The function of breath is the most ordinary and necessary of bodily functions. And as one learns in a yoga practice, it is also essential to the development of the mind-body relationship. The breath is central to the development and control of the mind, and poetry is an ordinary consequence of living from one moment to the next. But poetry, for Rukeyser, is not ordinary in any disparaging sense. Rukeyser makes ordinary language and poetic content function extra-ordinarily, and she believes that poetry, especially, is a kind of knowledge and resource that we are surrounded by, yet which often goes unused. In The Life of Poetry she writes,“it seems to me that we cut ourselves off, that we impoverish ourselves, just here. I think that we are ruling out one source of power, one that is precisely what we need.” In ways similar to and different from other modern women poets Rukeyser creates poems that are layered with poetic tradition, attentive to formal strategy, and that include content that is political but not didactic. Her poems are “ordinary”—using language that generally more common to her contemporary, everyday language—but not naïve or anti-intellectual. She writes of workers, women issues, and social and political events using language that often shifts registers in terms of tone, style, sound, and often includes reference to poetic predecessors as well as contemporary literary and social figures. Rukeyser continuously maintains the poetic/aesthetic space as one of mediation, process, reflection, and commentary in a way that is ordinary and as a specialized resource for contemporary culture, specifically in relation to the ways in which it can be written, read, and used toward the opening of social and political possibility.

Muriel Rukeyser

from The Life of Poetry


In the author's note before the book begins, R. writes:

A way to allow people to feel the meeting of their consciousness and the world, to feel the full value of the meanings of emotions and ideas in their relations with each other, and to understand, in the glimpse of a moment, the freshness of things and their possibilities...There is an art which gives us that way; and it is, in our society, an outcast art. [poetry]

...

I have tried to go behind the resistance, which is often a fear of poetry, and to show what might be ahead of this culture in conflict, with its background of strength and antagonism. If we are free, we are free to choose a tradition, and we find in the past as well as the present our poets of outrage--like Melville--and our poets of possibility--like Whitman.

...

I have attempted to suggest a dynamics of poetry, showing that a poem is not its words or its images, any more than a symphony is its notes or a river its drops of water. Poetry depends on the moving relations within itself. It is an art that lives in time, expressing and evoking the moving relation between the individual consciousness and the world. The work that a poem does is a transfer of human energy, and I think human energy may be defined as consciousness, the capacity to make change in existing conditions. It appears to me that to accept poetry in these meanings would make it possible for people to use it as an "exercise," an enjoyment of the possibility of dealing with the meanings in the world and in their lives.

while the snow is accumulating I think: what a day for a daydream
or, I think: how can this dog keep sleeping, what noise, what distraction
and I wonder: a space of cold, a monday in february, an inclination toward the softest powder

I could write you a response, something about the body or a bombing or how long it takes to float down from the very top floor or the building

or instead I could imagine a world without poetry

just kidding

but I think someone mentioned it. what is the purpose of poetry. or, what I mean to say is, what is the purpose of not poetry, of no poetry, how can there be any purpose without poetry

while the snow is accumulating it becomes clear that rukeyser and women poets and poetry are imperative

to a sense of (re)articulating, of understanding how language creates and unmakes us, how we can and can't use words to do anything, how policy and politics and journalism and science do their thing and poetry does a thing and sometimes these are related, complimentary, reciprocal, responsive to one another, and sometimes they are all doing totally separate things and that is how it is.

this sounds like a stein essay. no really. sometimes they are related and sometimes seemingly not. but one cannot have only political poetry or only aesthetic (aesthetically playful, innovative, etc etc) poetry (poetry interested in its aesthetic value or presentation vs having political content).

I am watching the snow accumulate and realize I have no point. about rukeyser or much else. not yet. but what is extra-ordinary about rukeyser, about women poets, about women modernist poets in their play between public (social, political, identificatory) and personal (aesthetic, linguistic, poetic, intuitive)...social location, the scientific, gender and intellectual politics... how is "the political" to be teased in layers, played through figurative and sensory inclinations, woven like the fabric of our very lives that are never simply a matter of form or content but a constant shifting and nuanced negotiation of both, of the continuum of these to always different degrees from one moment to the next.

more on rukeyser. that paper needs written. a possible layering of poems and snow and/or I procrastinate shoveling. waiting for spring, for concrete language, for images that resonate and help us clarify our own questions about the world. or ask more questions, maybe kind of the point, what kinds of questions will make us more...

Langston Hughes

Why Hughes is still important, popular, engaging, relevant, poetic, lovely, and great...

Just read The Weary Blues or listen to the version with music by Mingus. Or go to the National Portrait Gallery to see Winold Reiss' famous and fabulous portrait of Hughes: reflective, chin in hand, book open, the colors and lines of the portrait evoking the music and energy of the Harlem Renaissance. I wish Hughes had done the Inaugural Poem for Obama. Instead of empty emotionally manipulative patriotism (sorry Richard Blanco, I think you could have done better) Hughes would have inspired us and made us sway with his rhythms and his refusal to shy away from real content. The way he could bring us in with music and call our attention to the details of real life for real people. The boogie-woogie rumbles its continuing dreams, always present but patient, subtle, clever, linguistically tuned, musically savvy, politically subversive, revolutionary, peaceful, engaging. In Dream Boogie the narrator tells us to listen closely...ain't you heard... the beats are rumbling the music is playing dreams may be deferred but they are not destroyed. We can talk about the sun and the mood all day long or we can listen closely, for the beat, and see what will come of it. If we are lucky, we can become a part of the making of all that continues to come next.

sonnets

are about love and are not, have specific lengths and numbers of lines and don't, sound good or sound bad or sound otherwise, have a turn of thought in the middle or at the end, or stay on a topic, or jump around like ted berrigan...oh ted your collages and your common place vocabulary and your sex and your poems...what have you done to the sonnets what are the sonnets doing still? You are shakespeare you are italian you are frank o'hara you are 1960 you are new york. can we all not let some things go? play language sing poems sweat words assemble images or let them fall where they may on the page.

Let the sonnets fall where they may, here today.

from The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan

LXXXIII

Woman is singing the song and summer
Only to others, meaning poems. Because everything
Sorry about West Point. But where else was one to go,
Southwest lost doubloons rest, no comforts drift on dream smoke
Against whose griefs I would most assuage
(A cast-off emotion) A hard core is "formed."
Musick strides through these poems just as it strides thru me
my dream a drink with Lonnie Johnson we discuss the code
   of the west
After Ticonderoga.       Beware of Benjamin Franklin, he is
   totally lacking in grace
What else. Because he tended to think of truth as "The King's
   Birthday list"
This is called "Black Nausea" by seers.
My dream DEAR CHRIS hello. It is 3:17 a.m.
Your name is now a household name, as is mine. And in any case,
although I failed, now we need never be rivals

having gotten out of the habit

My new year goal: to sit down once in a while and write something thoughtful like I ask my students to do, and some of them do it so well... see the following in response to a chapter in Julia Cameron's The Right To Write:

http://alyssafreda.blogspot.com/2012/12/0-0-1-524-2992-washtenaw-community.html

Teaching is so fabulous--after breaking through the stress and the ridiculous that on occasion occur and make the fabulous blurry--because sometimes the students really do inspire and call us to be better ourselves, as people and as teachers. This is a good lesson to realize and remember at this yet another end of a semester.

Now Available!

Send $10 plus $2 shipping to:

Jill Darling

Frog Island Press

English Department 612 Pray-Harrold

Eastern Michigan University

Ypsilanti, MI 48197

or email frogislandpress@gmail.com for more info

Sex in the Library is an anthology of nine provocative, text-based performance pieces by members of the Writing for Performance class at Eastern Michigan University (Winter 2012). These texts represent an extensive range of textual and performance strategies examined and actualized over the course of the semester. The texts are captivating on the page: visually, linguistically, syntactically, and in terms of their performative, textual presentations. Each piece further points to its own dramatic realization off the page. From a musical score to an improvisational divination, the work included here is smart and dynamic, serious and hilarious, and of the caliber and genre-busting spirit of great Poets Theater work. Sex in the Library is a textual event indicative of many further off-page events to come.

Table of Contents

Emily Clarkson
Sound of Modern Silence                   

Emily Riopelle
The Monster                        

Kay Crawford                       

Melissa Bowling
What Was Once a Woman                   

G. Matthew Mapes
(rhetoric) X (labor) : an identity play in one act   

Matt Catania
iSpy and Sorel                       

Jonah D. Mixon-Webster
And We Made Them Kings                

Jill Darling
Mercury’s Conjunction to Venus               

Miranda Metelksi 


http://frogislandpress.blogspot.com/

Frog Island Press Ypsilanti, MI

Check out Frog Island Press!

i will tell him. on my own terms. in specific language. articulate the details.  i will show him. precisely. in no uncertain terms. explicitly. all of my hypotheses. conclusions. deductions. the process of logic. and support. for each point. i make each point with evidence. data. examples. rational explication. calm denotation. i explain to him my intention. my suppositions. my interests in the matter. my projections. forecasts. predictions. lay out my research. findings. supporting materials. i set up an organizational flow of content. draw connections. use transitions. make everything transparent. apparent. clear. decisive. i present him with my results. process plus product. trajectory. time line. goals. procedures. an array of clarity. indisputable. unanswerable. without question.

if she said. and then i said. and we agreed. or had a conversation. argued. a tone of voice. i would say. she would respond. we had this talk before. i tell her. she explains. we sigh. i yell. i apologize. i yell at the dog. i apologize for being loud. she said. in silence. i replied. in signs. if she intended. i would concur.

if you were here. I would tell you purple. if you were otherwise. I would be here. if purple were a name. I would recall childhood memories. if I were feeling yellow. you would return. if you returned. I would be here. if I return. we would meet at purple. if purple returned. we would have a conversation. if I ignored purple. you would bring the flowers. if I were here and you returned. there I would feel orange. if I were orange then I would know you were on your way. if I were on a journey. you would find me. if I met you there. we would celebrate yellow. if purple interceded. we would have a truce. if we draw up the papers. everyone will be happy. if we take another journey. no one will go astray. if we find each other. we will call all of the colors. if we shade our emotions with the pastels. it will rain in neon. if we draw out lime green and hot pink. we can be sure to find a new path. on any new path. we will eat skittles.

Monday Poetry at Noon at WSU

Department of English @ Noon Reading Series 2012: April 9, 2012 

Rob Halpern and Jill Darling

Date: Monday, April 9, 2012, 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Location: 10th Floor Conference Room, 5057 Woodward Avenue

Rob Halpern is the author of two books of poems, Rumored Place (Krupskaya 2004), which was nominated for a California Book Award, and Disaster Suites (Palm Press 2009), as well as several chapbooks, including Weak Link (Slack Buddha 2009) and Imaginary Politics (TapRoot Editions 2008). 

Jill Darling is a recent Ph.D. graduate of the English Department. She has published Solve For and Begin with May.

Free and open to the public.

at 3am

sometimes reading student blog responses to readings we do for class makes me smile out loud... especially when I'm reading at 3am...

Da fuq? Where'd the bass line go?

write a story that contains a variety of words. Cage is like Stein and then some. silence or nothingness. the space between the composition and the performance. each line will be performed for one second. one after another. the lecture is indeterminate. the performance is indeterminate. there are instructions. however the outcome is indeterminate. this is an example. i repeat. the example of nothingness. to say everything to say it all. someone said that. in silence it seems as if nothing is said. a cough. a scratch. turning pages. sound happens. life happens. don't play music over the text but fill in the spaces. or let the space resonate. it seems as if we are getting nowhere. over the course of things. a certain presence. nowhere but here. write a story that contains a multitude of sounds. a cacophony of climax. resounding resolution. cackling characters. a sizzling scene. the silence and singing space of narrative. in line breaks or dense blocks of text the page is a visual performance of language. performance of words and sound on paper. spilling into a three dimensional performance in the world.

story

When I take vacation I vacate. Or lean to the side, continuously. I can tell you, this is not a confession. It is an endeavor. To search for the limits of vacation, in terms of time and space. Where once was a beach, a tree, a broken heart, now exists a circle of accent and shades of tropical color. Where once existed optimism and woven dresses, now entails the continuum of gendered variation, skins layered with complexity. I was once heading in every direction. Leaving from every which way, or toward any other means of communication, when I decided. To vacate. The verb. Empty. Flee. Undo. Undone. Without. Dismissed. Disappeared. Once I went to the woods. Grew beans. Lived in a cabin. Once I went to the sea. Caught fish. A fish. Followed that fish to my death. Once I traveled to Venice. Winding streets, lost forever to the present. Once I hid in an attic and wrote poems for months on end. Once I traveled to Florida. Found love. Lost it. And traveled home again, alone. Once, even the horizon had become too much. Leaning, further on, against the end of days, I can tell you, this is a mystery story. Science fiction contained by metaphors of the past. Having left only traces, contained by syntax. And vertical form. In this space, having vacated every other, I found conflict. And resolved to continue on.

this invisible

i told you there may have been some sort of rhetoric

involved, in the combination of

events, toward the evolution of

circumstances

you cannot see it, but i know it like

thunder, and the accumulation of

sentences, subject, verb, a clarity of

intention, what was said and wasn't

said, quietly misarticulated and a

suggestion for more (words sounds metaphor)

take license with the only keys available so that

circumstances

will not determine outside of each structure of

feeling

at the top of the tallest building
array of color
film cut: Berlin in the 80s
cut again: Paris
wonder in image fragments
light swirl my stomach
from a building above, a prerogative
interrogate, flash image of
apartments
streets, littered with color
crumbling like graffiti from
the wall, cut
to a poet speaking in verse
verses likes lines of the film
in 16mm, and sliced, like a layer
of fog, celluloid fantasy of the real
viewer silent frame by frame
ventriloquises her own dialogue
over images of glen close, faded
a ghost of features: eyes, lips
in slow motion, nearly stopped
circus music, and the distraction of
make believe, suspended belief
words fall from glen's hair
secretly

how detroit is half full, of color, graffiti lines etched
on a postcard, coral against blue, outline of a skyscraper

a skyscraper, against a forest, can you hear it, in color
like graffiti that is art, publicly, on a wall, that is a city

a quixotic illusion of space, on a horse or in a dream
a city that is a heart full of water, pumping, like life in the veins of an ocean

an ocean of coral colored art, on posters that surround the city
of water, against a building of glass and dreams, or excursions

from one story into another, an adventure etched in lines
on a wall, against a city, as large as Quixote, as real as the fantastical

postcard, layered in blues, pumping like veins half full
of illusion and scenery, a windmill falling, a knight striving

etched in opposite pages, of space, layered in colored graffiti
like an ocean, told on walls, in grooves, at the very tip of the tallest building

instrumental imaginings
while the blue girl swims toward
death, she gurgles, breathing, blotches
for skin, and marshmallows
melting into her lips and washed
away, like the blue girl, enclosed with
secrets, others' mystery or guilt
like sugar, melting on her lips, washed
away, secrets of a life, of a blue
wave, ebbing and flowing
toward or away from saving, a living
and dying, intrumental to the succession
of imagined realities, like secrets, held
in the chests, of the drowned

a body or a voice

reading Lolita. the body. the disembodied. the narrative voice in first or third person. Lolita is not a voice. is not a point of view. is an object of the narrative. of narrative desire. of desire. Lolita is a fantasy. a possession. to be. possessed. tamed. those nymphets are driving me crazy (Humbert.) I will find out the mystery, the evil, why they possess me, by possessing them (Humbert). Her. she is them. the nymphets. this is an obsession. an addiction. but it is not. evil. evil handsome charming violent offense. the body or the voice. a voice of a nation. the landscape of a country, before the interstate system. from one highway to another. through one town and another. visiting one and then another and then another tourist trap, scenic byway, historical monument, cave, lake, hotel, marked hotspot on the map, famous attraction, whatnot. driving. reading. the body. a narrative of lack. lacking it's own main character. not a character. a voice. not even a voice. an idea of a voiced desire. fantastical elimination of subjectivity and free will. voice subject to constraints of power and gender. a manipulation of rational emotion. intoxication of power. possessing and containing. creating a void of a body, of a life, of a point of view. narrative homicide, gradual and violent torture.