Poetry
Three
Glasnost
Made in form, something denied in kind, or plastered in speech. We did not heed the stampede, nor the protectorate of function. We were made in the image and likeness of image and likeness, netted in spectacle, according to doctrine. Who’s on first philosophy, a judge and composition student both study sentencing guidelines. The law is plagiarized from superstition. The soccer riot has been contained to the following districts: the demagogues’ quarter, the maize aisle, the half sandwich and soup, the Assizes.
Genus
The calling to arms of these objects that connect nothing with nothing recalls our recent glut of liberal arts grads. Seven hundred thousand archeologists in a state of becoming in the City of God, which isn’t zoned for brontosaurus excavation. The exhausted refugees from Paleozoic nostalgias return to the Denny’s short order ghettoes and wait for necessity’s water to break.
Printemps
Channels, aqueducts, alternating frequencies of automatic writing, the electoral college of the desert winds, the tombs of water. The news landfill, the priest trees melting behind a procession of cool animals. Inexactness moves in channels too; your metallic ice floes. There is always a panorama of the visible before us, but a hegemony of channels, where the chosen string is now the capital-s Sea with its Charles Olson voice, now vellum, now the periodic table, now a secret location.
Contributor
Andrew BostonANDREW BOSTON lives in Brooklyn. He curates the Lungfull! Reading Series.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
“POETRY AS FORCES” AFTER Cecilia Vicuña
By Andrea Abi-KaramAPR 2019 | Critics Page
The "about to happen" / "poetry as forces" when Cecilia Vicuña says that the lies (the words, the language) of the Chilean dictatorship murdered & tortured thousands of people I remember the power of the word & i remember the power of poetry—"made of forces"—that holds something in the action of language
Uncle Ho’s Poetry
By Richard TuttleFEB 2018 | Poetry
Richard Tuttle recently showed with James Ensor – a hero, whom he feels has brought the verbal and visual to the same plane, as well as contributing to the literature of artists who write about art – in Ostend, Belgium. Enlisting as a pilot in Vietnam, the Air Force decided Tuttle could not be trusted to "push the button", and gave an honorable discharge. The wounds of those years, for many, he believes, are still not healed. A suggested reading list from RT: Ho Chi Minh: A Life, by William J. Duiker; Down With Colonialism! (speeches of Ho Chi Minh, with an introduction by Walter Bello), & The Prison Poems of Ho Chi Minh (with an intro and photos by Larry Towell; also in various editions).
Why Poetry Now
By Ann LauterbachAPR 2018 | Editor's Message
A friend recently handed me a bumper sticker that reads WHO NEEDS POETRY. A question in the form of a statement.
four
By Patricia Spears JonesJUL-AUG 2020 | Poetry
Patricia Spears Jones is author of A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems and nine other poetry publications. She is an editor, literary curator, anthologist, cultural critic, and playwright. She is an Emeritus Fellow at the Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress. She was the 2020 Louis H Rubin Writer-in-Resident at Hollins University. Originally from Arkansas, she calls Brooklyn home.
