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
Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979
By Megan N. LibertyNOV 2020 | Art Books
This addendum to the history of concrete poetry makes evident the connections between concrete poetry and artist books. Chance visual connections between the diverse works included make visible the materiality of language, the unifying component of concrete poetry.
Waking From the Dream of Mark Leidner’s Poetry
By Bianca StoneJUNE 2021 | Books
The title of Mark Leidner’s new gorgeously made book Returning the Sword to the Stone is apt. Like a reverse Arthur Pendragon, we decide not to go for the holy grail, not to accept our righteous lineage, and maybe not to pursue a noble quest in human development but stay home and continue “whipping ourselves with Christmas lights” and theorizing about why we do it. We’re considering our crazy human condition and laughing at our own limited idea of ourselves.
“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
“The beauty of this world knocked me off my feet”:
The Poetry of Dick Gallup
By Nick Sturm
FEB 2021 | Poetry
Nick Sturm is the NEH Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetics at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. His poems and essays are published in Jacket2, PEN, ASAP/J, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. His scholarly and archival work can be traced at his blog Crystal Set.
