Where
has it all gone? I feel like summer barely began.
Here's what the young ladies looked like a week-plus ago, with Clare Latremouille's horses.
Northampton MA: Zoe Tuck was good
enough to send along a copy of her recent chapbook Soft Investigations (Daily Mayhem Books, 2019), a small collection
made up of the prose/essay-poem “[Typical Trans Kenkyusha Sortes]” (a piece
that won the Stacy Doris Prize and first appeared in Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review), the extended/fragmented lyric
“Fly into a page,” and the lyric accumulation “Friday 19 April 2019.” The first
piece really struck my attention for how she manages to weave together
references to Community, Robert Duncan,
Berkeley Breathed, Roland Barthes and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, among others, in a way that plays with multiple
directions, odd connections and the direct line of thought. As she writes:
I don’t want to
be lonely, even in my poems—especially in my poems, so I started to fill them
with quotes from other artists. Didn’t you know that was coming next? Like when
Troy in “Community” says that he gets lonely in the shower. That’s when I
listen to podcasts about the death of the author or dance in translation and I
struggle to make out the tinny sound of my phones speaker over the whirr of the
ventilation fan while I lather my armpits with peppermint soap.
The other day I
decided that I would hold up Roland Barthes as my model because he’s smart and
he writes purdy. And who hates Roland Barthes? Aside from that New Yorker
reviewer with the bee in his bonnet (you have read 1 of 4 free articles for
this month).
2 and a half
years of grad school and I still don’t want to be a man and something vague
about phenomenology.
San
Francisco CA: I only discovered recently that
Canadian poet Lisa Robertson had a chapbook out with American publisher
Krupskaya, her Starlings (2017). Starlings is a suite of poems that is
“one part of wide rime,” a project
that, as her author biography writes, “is her ongoing lyric study of troubadour
poetics.” Did I mention that the thirty-page chapbook is also available online through their website as a free pdf download?
Yesterday I
cried. It was artless and good.
Spring has its own
agony, truly
It involves
convolution
For the nudity
of one kiss
Joy suffers
measure
How tiring it is
to disagree with everything!
Then we go
visiting, throw our tender runners
Over forest-rim
Starlings. We
are breaking into a vast derelict space.
We are the
Starling scene in Sterne’s Sentimental
Journey.
A caged Starling
is repeating in the voice of a Child “I cannot get out.”
I’m fascinated by Roberston’s exploration into some of
the origins of contemporary lyric through the tradition of the troubadour,
something that easily links to her earlier work on the pastoral, but one that
isn’t always explored by those engaged with more experimental types of writing.
some were at the
edge of language to
couldn’t live.
Some were at the core of
language so
couldn’t live either. What if
we forget about
language, move into
the natural
history of the idea
of guts? Guts or
rosewater, very
similar.
Rosewater or rime. Uncountrying
by means of
rosewater. To make a natural history
of rosewater,
penetrate
borders
San
Francisco/Santa Barbara CA: The first I’ve seen by
Santa Barbara poet, editor and country singer Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the
chapbook JULIAN (Krupskaya, 2017),
clearly missing out on numerous full-length titles, including gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse,
2011), Advice for Lovers (2012) and Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017). There is some thoughtful play in the language of Brolanski’s poems, composing direct statements that shift, switch, bait and twist,
including the poem “butterflies are stupid,” the title of which caught my
attention immediately:
a butterfly is
an example of an idiotic image
not one to
idolatrize
they are former
worms I guess, not-worms
I was telling
nick yesterday about the dangers of idolatry
I gave the
example of a butterly like
oh I saw a
butterfly you saw a butterfly isnt it magical like
making fun of
myself
then I gave
another example to holi over coffee at the good earth
he “often” talks
about tattoos people shouldn’t get
especially if
they don’t have any tattoos yet
I said yeah like
a butterfly on your neck
he said oh weird
you say so the lyft driver I had yesterday had a butterfly
tattooed on his
neck, here, he indicated the throte
and no other
tattoos at all at all
then for some
reason I was moved to tell you my own
story about the
butterfly landing on me
again and again
while I was in a patch of sun and outlifted my limbs
I compared it to
the rat-dove and its wing
that literally
swept over me touched my head touched my hair
like
beaudelaire’s wind of the wing of madness
the word he uses
is ‘I’imbécilité’ it turns out
the wind of the
wing of imbecility or idiocy
but a butterfly
is an example of a thing not to idolatrize
___
(wrong [upward
arrow emoji]
but you can tell
i kind of know it
hypocrite like vernon telling of his vision
flying above all
the other little christians at the campfire
just dying in
retrospect in his own way to be proved wrong)
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