The Brooklyn Rail

A note on the form

The niner is a contemporary form of the nine-line poem, typically in sequences of nine poems. More recently, the niner consists of lines of nine syllables and/or other numerical orderings in the number of sounds or words related to the number nine.

Coined by the poet Mendoza and adopted by various innovative writers, the niner is seemingly a “sonnot,” resembling a sonnet while radically departing from its conventions; a perverse sounding that adopts a seemingly masochistic containment. The nine-syllable line itself is a brash, punk, or post-punk response to the metrics of Anglophone verse. The form has allowed for experiment and study in dialect and accent, and their effect upon the language, contained in a line of nine syllables or beats.

 

 

 

[ i / 1 ]
this of obscure cosmos /
violence,, reiterated
vivid, paused blood in fire & syn
thetics << silver & liquid
eyes stenciled brick quot
-as / authors who could not
conceive us & hold / to have live

-d im/possible gravity ,,
chilled & // all known ways

 

 

 

 

[ i / 2 ]
decimate, un/made & horny
, our shaven flesh & locks, dined on
black beans, corn & sugar, vagabonds,
tinkers, tricksters & jailbirds <
had demanded our bodies O
fascist rags, codes & division
s systematic flesh & capitals

nostalgia imposed & gen
der/ivative nations ,, soil [~

 

 

 

 

[ i / 3 ]
agree: your logic treacherous
political & philosophic
,, distribution of thought & activ
-ity engineer’d [#] divest
meant hot policing & exot
-ic / “but some of us want to keep

our jobs” in yur demand that we flesh
nice for being & pills / had
abolished yur entitlements,, our

 

 

 

 

[ i / 4 ]
sexes & flesh constituted
from the women & femmes who charged

you: pale & sweating majorities
/ smears & intonations
assured arrogant thieves [$
if your violence a source of pleasure
/ we trust our anxious days & juts
where once bridges, borders,,

decline winter bones;; gorgeous, warm

 

 

 

 

[ i / 5 ]
grrrl // if we are citizens
of nowhere, a threat to the tone &
image;; composed / lace cute
we divine femmes no here to disse
-ct your impositions >>
so late in the day, bark organs
in casual violence: your pleasure
excruciate living / &
the beauty about our eyelines

 

 

 

 

[ i / 6 ]
this decades-old violence, for board
stars & black salt, she said the possi-
ble diminished / order admini
stirred names, [[ norm

haar & solstice eyed / fall into
the waged day , turbulent shimmer
out of discourse traded close, pinned
/ ordinary trappings & verse
to squat ,, dis / locate

 

 

 

 

[ i / 7 ]
in nationhood, your reveries
five hundred truncated years, we
dined on stolen whisky, tar, minis
-terial bones / forced to find work
a rustic allegory, regen
narrating cities & ag/gressions
light & nature false con
dition’d : cohered by skins our
/ separated, crashed _{[, lit]}

 

 

 

 

[ i / 8 ]
at trial : yur crimes of invention
in my charred gold minidress /
cremated homes, debt && circuits
capital commission & hate

dined on flour, divine salt &&
threads of your flags ,, aroused,
our vulgar comedy, drives &
erotics, silenced >/ your beliefs
& rituals :: disintegrating,

 

 

 

 

[ i / 9 ]
[≈] we impossible siblings,, lobes
sore, close hairs & gleaming / our
traumas dismissed / bitter salt stream
-ing cheeks, spark / structurally

yur lavish/ious divisions
, devaluations, institut
-ions, blood_,, harmonics
/ of work, migration & con
jugal / flicker, track memory