Carrie Lorig & Nick Sturm Rewrite The Reagans
Nancy & The Dutch
by Carrie Lorig & Nick Sturm
Art by Camilla Frankl-Slater
*FREE* echapbook by NAP
A collaboration in erasure, expansion, redaction, rearrangement, re-appropriation, history revocation, history reallocation, language morphing, silencing, voicing, performing, ignoring, and prophesying the president of my childhood, Mr. Ronald Reagan, and his wife Nancy. It’s a beautiful estrangement. Check it out!!!
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February 4th, 2013 / 3:18 pm
February 4th, 2013 / 3:18 pm
Mike Young—
“What we are left with is bodies that are confused: incapable, on a molecular level, of maintaining the basic boundaries that are constitutive of self.” — from Carolyn Lazard’s “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity” in Cluster Mag, a brilliant essay about illness that is really an essay about everything. (Thanks to Anne Boyer and Danielle Pafunda for the link)
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HBO’s hit TV show GIRLS: what it should mean for everyone
I feel an enormous (and delicious) pressure to write about the hit TV show GIRLS, now on HBO, every Sunday. I have been told by my editors that women read, watch TV, and purchase “added value” products. I was surprised to learn that anyone still does these things. READ MORE >
Alexandra Petri and John Deming Should Probably Get Married Because They Have A Lot In Common Because They Are Both Considerably Misinformed About Poetry
I intentionally missed most of the inauguration of Bruce Springsteen’s boyfriend. Symbols of democracy and freedom make my tummy quite queasy. I prefer the enchantment of The Little Mermaid to the mediocrity of the middle class and the person that they pick to govern them. But a couple of days after The Boss’s “partner” was publicly sworn in, I overheard two princess friends of mine discussing a poetry quarrel that arose from this inauguration. Supposedly a poet named Richard (I’m not sure of his last name, and considering his connection to Obama, he’s certainly not talented enough to Google or even Bing) read. The poem prompted a girl Washington Post blogger, Alexandra Petri, to declare that poetry is probably dead. A poetry boy, John Deming, quickly rendered a rebuttal. After reading both, I’ve come to the conclusion that each has a very un-magical, unsupportable viewpoint on poetry.
To begin, I’d like to declare that being “dead” isn’t deplorable: it’s delightful. Sylvia adored the dead. She covered herself in concentration camp victims. Her skin was “bright as Nazi lampshade.” Was Sylvia disempowered or on the margins of culture? No way, progressive gays! Sylvia was a spitfire. She slashed her daddy and her canonized poet husband. Charles Baudelaire, one of the best boy poets ever, sought the dead too. In “Spleen (ii)” Charles boasts that his skull holds “more corpses than a common grave.” Identification with dead doesn’t disadvantage Charles either. He’s a dandy — someone superlatively superior to humans, a boy who follows his own special set of laws. The dead are special and unique. They’re much more powerful than humans. To call someone or something dead is a term of incredible endearment, and should be embraced.
The Chick Flix Series #FridayReads
Jennifer L. Knox is currently curating a super fucking spectacular series of essays on women in cinema over at the consistently awesome Delirious Hem.
Here is a list of the writers and films, which includes Laura Carter on Desperately Seeking Susan, Carrie Lorig on Divine Horsemen, Gina Abelkop on Meek’s Cutoff, Danielle Pafunda on Jennifer’s Body, and many, many more.
Here is an explanation of its inception.
Here is Becca Klaver’s “Teaser Guide” to the series.
And here are the contributions thus far.
“to overlook / when I am at an overlook and at no other time”
Dear stunning axe, the sad Alexander, the scores
of life, the life that will probably be, the life
of the biggest thoughts, to have found the pizza
faultless, to have noted, in the mountains, the fitting
thing about being in the mountains, that you feel
upheld, the 99th part of 100, only lonely in the house,
on the street, through the turnstiles, in the stadium,
the held beer and the beer that is in the cup holder,
the I am thinking about the suits of the travelers,
prodigious coffee, enraptured pop, the guitars
that sound like bubbles and the ones that sound
like lasers, the I have met trees, two or three
times, that made me cry, sad about injustice, sad
about environment, by all means, gravely, with great
concern, without being flip, the I am trying to be
honorable, to be all right again, to overlook
when I am at an overlook and at no other time,
the I have accepted it, I of the friendlier memories,
I of the best love to your mother, I met her, she
liked me, the young man, the polite, the I am writing
that there may be a pencil rubbing, some borders
to the epoch, the foghorn I heard, the breakfast,
the here I am, hours early, as always, mid-winter,
pelagic, the tyrannosaurus of popularity, the burgeoning
truth arrived at upon further consideration, a diamond
cutting the blank, blank, blank, much as we might
choose to skip over it, the part of life that is bracketed
off, sorry how sudden, sorry and sorrier, quiet
to greet you, quiet as an airport when life is over.
11 Favorite Small Press Reads of 2012
2012 was a great year for reading, the best in recent memory and lot of the great books I read came from small presses. Eleven stood out, even among a great group of books. I won’t say these are the best because that is an arbitrary, fleeting designation. These books are my favorites–ones I keep going back to because of a story or a poem or a turn of phrase that has lingered. These books are examples of beautiful writing that does more than appear on the page.
The Sovereignties of Invention by Matthew Battles
Luna Miguel, now in English translation
The great Spanish poet Luna Miguel has a bilingual, Spanish/English-translation book coming out from Scrambler Books, entitled Bluebird and Other Tattoos. It ships December 22nd. Here is my blurb for it:
Luna Miguel is a poet who can make me cry. Her passion for life and for poetry is uncommon. She makes language concise, supple, and exciting again. Recurring images: of birds, disease, spit, and blood, integral to a mortal, embodied poetry that reminds us ‘Death cannot be experienced neither for the living nor the dead but for the sick.’ Luna writes a poem, ‘The Beautiful World Gives Me Disgust.’ She writes, ‘I exist, therefore, / then I tremble.’ She writes of the suicidal poets, she writes of all women, she writes of the young. She writes knowing it’s a lie, she lives in the shadow of death. Luna writes of her ‘unprotected life,’ her ‘unprotected diary.’ There is no comfort in this poetry, there is hard beauty. ‘The wind was this. Being born was this. Dying without dying and without a disease was this. To tell you the truth: I am here and I need you.’ Luna.
“A Botanist considers the coconut one-seeded drupe (aka: dry drupe)”
One thing I can recommend without even needing a kickback is coconut milk ice cream. It’s pretty easy to make on your own, it’s good if you don’t eat dairy for whyever, some companies that make it have hilarious videos of their hippie-ass founders on their websites, and one time on the phone with Comcast I actually bonded with the person from Comcast over it, over coconut milk ice cream. Another thing I can recommend is Coconut #15, the newest issue of an online poetry magazine, which is back after a hiatus. Way back in 2005, I used to get Coconut mixed up with Shampoo, so now you know whether you would ever want to take a shower with me.
I don’t get Coconut #15 mixed up with anything, which is because the old old old universe is shaped like a saddle. And also because my love for you is not a coin operated washer/drier or that type of orgasm (Spectateur, -trice, n) that watches you, as if from above. Instead I am a vibration as hard as a living creature, and I am always on the lookout for officers of light. Instead I keep finding “history” in mornings and quotation marks. The prisoners keep hitchhiking and waving soap box guns. You keep puking in your mother’s mouth, which doesn’t help Dorothea any, because she already expects all the witches. Galaxy-sheep can count every time they’ve cried in a hole in the wall piano bar. They know they don’t need to count anything to know that everyone’s a hero or fooled you. Imagine sleeping in a canoe or as a toy whale in a gutter. Now imagine everybody as a 
feather on a child with a bird’s head. If that feels annoying, let your eyes wander to water. Try to understand those kids who hide in abandoned refrigerators and want shoulder blades to replace knives. If you are lucky you’ll be able to see the turnip fields from here, glowing and torpedoed from the rain. You’ll see yourself downing your fourth energy drink and hating how not tired you are. People who play video games don’t sleep. People who don’t sleep watch commercials. Don’t comfort it out in the middle there. We will absorb these rules like a saltbath. We check out the list of demands and it’s filled with things we like but never used to like. In what you once famously referred to as my earlier, bullshit life, the clock on the bed and the white horse sad as the island both failed to tell me what time it is because time is a mirror made wrong. How many times have you wandered beneath the dark only to emerge into darker? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my cloud to understand anything. You tell yourself your bones are too fat to fly and a tree tells you otherwise. The tree tells you it was beautiful to hold boys who wanted to make girlfriends out of paper or stones, and the fiddlehead fern—with gunshots of light in the leaves?—it high-fives you in your face.
Tyrant Books Midnight Release: Strange Cowboy / Sky Saw
New York Tyrant/Tyrant Books has recently brought two more important texts into the world.
If you’re familiar with the work of these authors, you don’t need me to tell you it is awesome (as in inspiring awe) and wonderful (as in screaming waffle-irons). If you’ve never held an object from Tyrant Books in your hands, I suggest you find a remedy. First lines are below.
My mother sits, dead, could be, though I believe she lives, though she is old in life, and should she not be dead, then might at least appear to some to be more dead than living.
Now
White cone descended in sound blister