The Day the Comments Died
Deadgod writes a memoir.
Bookslut starts talking about rap.
The openended snippets eat their young.
Poets have sex.
You try to “like” a Denver omelet.
The omelet gets an MFA.
Jimmy Chen starts juxtaposing billboards on a highway.
Some of the drivers are menstrual.
Big Other blows up.
Montevidayo blows up.
Submishmash combusts.
Ploughshares raises their submission fee to $400 a word.
Bookslut starts talking about rap.
The openended snippets eat their young.
Poets have sex.
You try to “like” a Denver omelet.
The omelet gets an MFA.
Jimmy Chen starts juxtaposing billboards on a highway.
Some of the drivers are menstrual.
Big Other blows up.
Montevidayo blows up.
Submishmash combusts.
Ploughshares raises their submission fee to $400 a word.
Obama hits a kill switch.
There’s no one left worth killing.
Brandon Gorrell adds the “Scott” back to his name.
Everyone else is still named Jonathan.
There’s no one left worth killing.
Brandon Gorrell adds the “Scott” back to his name.
Everyone else is still named Jonathan.
AWP is MLA.
MLA is Fur Con.
Syllabi are lonely.
Experimental literature is words.
People “like” their own reflections.
The reflections unsubscribe.
Shame dies.
Fear lives.
The reflections unsubscribe.
Shame dies.
Fear lives.
Baby Bump
Yesterday I was walking around Brooklyn on my cell phone and I walked so far I ended up in Big Sur. Who knew Big Sur is so close to Brooklyn? I was like, This has to be the shittiest Big Sur it is so shitty.
I was on the phone with my Aunt Shira and she felt deprived of information as to why I don’t have a baby. I was like, Do you want to know why? There is an Ann Lauterbach poem that might help you understand. It helps me understand maybe a little. She was like, Is Ann Lauterbach Jewish?
The poem I’m talking about is called “Indictment Without Subject” and it doesn’t really help me understand why I don’t have a baby, but it’s a neat poem.
In it Ann Lauterbach uses repetition to convey reproduction in machinelike, rather than biological terms. She writes:
The bourgeoisie tribe makes babies.
The babies cry I want.
The babies cry more.
This is how it learns to count.
Lauterbach’s language suggests that the tribe’s baby-making is a capitalist action: a product of and for conspicuous consumption, rather than a biological urge. They “make” babies like a factory makes a widget. The babies’ first words in the poem are not Mommy or Daddy, but “want” and “more.” Rather than establishing a dynamic of a parent teaching a child, the tribe instead consumes its children by “learning to count” them.
When I think about Lauterbach as a female poet, I wonder how her consumerist portrayal of reproduction reflects upon women as childbearers and mothers? Nowhere in the stanza do we see any natural imagery, conveying childbirth as a biological action. The act of birthing and child-rearing are not described as women’s work, nor is there any joy in the process. Rather, it’s the collective “it” that churns out babies. Any reproductive ineluctability in this poem arrives out of an industrial, rather than a biological basis. The act of making babies—and the paradigm that encourages this as indispensable—is rendered a manufactured social signifier.
Can making art be as satisfying as making babies?
Is it selfish to deny your Aunt a niece?
Is there pressure on female artists to have it all?
Is there pressure on male artists to have it all?
Would you rather feel the pressure to have it all than the pressure to have only one thing?
Do you talk to your family?
Howz your biological clock doing?
FUSE IS BOOM
If you asked me who wrote Fuse I’d say it’s a human like you who has lived and died and lived. What’s fresh about Fuse is how Marc McKee manages to stuff so much velocity into poems structured like strong towers. How does he blow shit up and still keep the roof on? As McKee writes, “We must / draw our maps of the impossible.” Fuse is structured chaos; it’s entropy with an MRI of the damages. And the damages are what maybe make a life.
How do you review a life? How do you even review a book? I could give you cogent loop-de-loops in which I try to impress with my best Vendlerese. “The river is talking to the Holiday / Inn. It’s a line I use at parties: / When I am 46. When I am dead,” writes McKee. I could get all language on it so that it really becomes about me and my gutterals. What I want to do is feed you the entire text through the screen, but this is a book you definitely want to hold as an object.
Here is a chunk, from the poem “Dear”:
3 Comments
January 4th, 2012 / 1:04 pm
January 4th, 2012 / 1:04 pm
woman reading A Season In Hell 2 days before the world ends-but-won’t has 22 thoughts
1. Rimbaud was a hot twink.
2. Rimbaud loved the shit out of god.
3. If Rimbaud read that article in Time about how Mother Teresa didn’t feel the presence of god for 50 years but did her work anyway, he probably wouldn’t beat himself up so much about not experiencing “celestial calm.”
4. Celestial calm is spa spirituality.
5. Who wants to be numb?
6. I want to be numb.
Melissa Broder—
Silliman’s year-end list is up and some of it is what you might expect, peeps from his posse (good peeps) like Armantrout, Waldman, DuPlessis, Bernstein, and thennn there’s someone named Steve Roggenbuck on there too. Neat.
4
woman reading Flowers of Evil on hanukkah night 1 has 22 thoughts
1. Baudelaire wants out like I want out–up and out.
2. Baudelaire wants god.
3. Baudelaire is looking for god in opium, hash, morphine and pussy.
4. Baudelaire is looking for god in god.
5. If ______ calls it Les Fleurs du Mal in a soft voice one more time I am going to kill him.
6. Would be cool to be a muse, but only if the poet is hot and good. Otherwise it would be gross.
7. Feel like I’ve only been a muse to yucky people.
8. Feel like if I behaved like Baudelaire it would be acting out.
Sunday Service: Sarah Rose Nordgren poem
Unfolded
All the world’s details blur when I turn
the fan on to sleep. The little cattle
fall over on the table. The sheep wobble.
Furniture skids across the floor
like crumpled receipts. The house,
an origami box, is undone.
Confetti falls out. Flimsy, after all,
like mother said, it wasn’t expected to last.
I have no husband, no child,
no dog to feed: the faces
I put so much faith in are paper circles.
Templates of Christ, they
resemble him in the most obvious ways:
mute and tiny and light. But He is
invisible. Unfolded. Taking
His beatings with gratitude and grace.
Sarah Rose Nordgren’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Pleiades, The Literary Review, Quarterly West, Cincinnati Review, Verse Daily, and the Best New Poets 2011 anthology. She is the recipient of two poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she is currently in residence, and a Louis Untermeyer Tuition Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She grew up in Durham, North Carolina.
13 Ways of Looking at a Litblog
I
Among twenty posts,
The only moving thing
Was the Hitler meme.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
With three Disqus personae.
III
The litblog whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a big part of the procrastination.
IV
A man and a litblog
Are one.
A man and a woman and a litblog
Are a VIDA pie chart.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of turning on the computer
Or the beauty of turning it off,
The moment you hit send
Or just after.
Sunday Service: Scott Hammer Poem
from SAVE
The player piano was haunted.
No one knew
the difference between
it and its twin
in Sioux City,
which had no spirit.
Saloons these days still reek
of hollowed peanut
shells.
Still cover puke with sawdust.
They play La Paloma of
Her Own Volition.
The machine rolls, the
keys get depressed.
Just like that, some drunk
in the corner
starts singing.
Scott Hammer is the author of the poetry chapbook Mock Draw. His writing has appeared in La Petite Zine, Noo Weekly, Lungfull!, Poet Lore, Press 1, Inertia Magazine, and Hamilton Stone Review. He is currently writing and living in Philadelphia, and can be followed on Tumblr.
POPULAR POST
This post yesterday was goddamn funny. I almost laughed my ass off. I laughed, and I enjoyed the laughing, because I am worn out, time kills you, existence is terrifying, laughing is the meds, it feels good to be included and not to be the one getting laughed at. The laughing is temporary shelter from bigger extinction, by way of smaller inclusion. I’m not alone. Someone else is alone. Not me.
The post made me sad too. I laughed, but I couldn’t laugh my ass quite off. Almost off but not quite. Like, I laughed my ass ¾ off but I also watched myself laughing and was like: You so stupid, gurl. That’s you he is making fun of. ALONE. You are up there alone. If one of us is up there alone, it is you. It is always you, in a Schopenhauer sense, nah mean?
I felt like a cog, too: cog-ish, cog-esque. I thought about “mean” and I thought about it as a hits-generator. Perhaps, first and foremost, mean is a hits generator. We are helping to generate hits! Hooray!?
The etymology of the word “mean”, according to etymonline, is: