With “Leo’s Playtime Invocation” I set out to capture the mounting tension I see in Leo every time I squeak his ball. His movement and barks grow more urgent with every squeak and every playtime seems to set us into a trance of tease, throw, capture, and retrieve. Moondog’s composition entitled “Invocation” lends itself to creating a compound mimicry of a rising ‘Shepard’s Tone‘ with video clips whose motion and content form a sort of visual poetic line or set of refrains. My voice and poem adds my own temporary psychosis. As I talk to Leo, I notice he pays me no heed. I’m but a needle and plunger to his heroin.

Nathan Curtis Warner is an unpublished writer curating the performance series LYE:SITUATIONS and the reading series LYE:WORDS in Portland, OR.

I wrote the first 16 lines of Viewer’s Guide last November in Mexico after revisiting Ionesco. Flash forward to March 2014: I’m hanging at Manitoba’s in NYC and meet Handsome Dick and get myself drunk. I start thinking about those lines again. I start thinking about Cioran and getting laid. All thought fails and soon enough I’m on the train back to NJ, secretly snapping photos of unsuspecting passengers. I awake hours later with my phone in my pants and pull it out and scroll through pics. I focus on one where a beauty is exploited by three brains. My head is an air of gray next so I continue the 4-month-old poem. For another 4 lines my violence prevails. The poem then shifts to scenes that are invisible to every brain I’m aware of. I cut that off prematurely. I smile for a while and see my observations fade into nothing.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .  .RC Miller lives in Metuchen, NJ. He is creator of Mask With Sausage, Pussy Guerilla Face Banana Fuck Nut & Demon Drawings, all published (or soon to be) by gobbet press. Miller maintains an art blog via WIGFUCKER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DJ Gay Gravy was born into a religious family. Later, he read Richard Rorty and learned to love again. Now, he spends 98% of his free time watching battle rap. More videos here. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

 a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible Academy of American Poets. …(JaJaJaJaJa)…

I’ve been working on a number of “song” poems, as in songs that are sung under one’s breath, never really meant to be listened to. The songs are often unkempt, ancient and embarrassing. The identity of the original singer is unknown and unimportant, as these songs are constantly getting sung somewhere.

Ryan MacDonald is a lecturer in the Studio Art Department at UMass, Amherst. He is the 2012 winner of the American Short(er) Fiction award. His collection of stories, The Observable Characteristics of Organisms will be released from FC2 in August 2014.

Jordan Stempleman’s collections include No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press 2012) and the forthcoming Wallop (Magic Helicopter Press 2014). He edits The Continental Review, runs the Common Sense Reading Series, & teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. Find out more here.

 a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing.

Jessalyn Wakefield can literally teleport. You can literally find her work at amihuman.net. Farren Stanley lives in Santa Fe and is published or forthcoming in places like Handsome, Front Porch, RealPoetik, Caketrain, H_NGM_N, New Delta Review and Greying Ghost Press.

A Rabbit in Labor

             by

Farren Stanley / Jessalyn Wakefield

The Rabbit Poems are a collaborative project between myself and Farren Stanley. We wrote A Rabbit in Labor while I was in Alabama, visiting Farren, who was working on her MFA in Tuscaloosa. We spent a lot of time doing shots of Fireball and drinking Budweiser and watching Jeopardy at her bar, Egan’s. There were also late night topless pool crashings, sexy coeds, hot dance parties, and a fucking lot of writing. It was killer. I dropped out of my undergrad three semesters in, so I’m sure my two weeks in Tuscaloosa packed in all the grad school I might ever have needed.

note: I’ve started this feature up as a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing. I mean it’s astonishing how they are able to get masterpieces of such stature out to the masses on an almost daily basis. But, some poems, though formidable in their own right, aren’t quite right for that pantheon. And, so I’m planning on bridging the gap. A kind of complementary series. Enjoy!

TJ Lyons is in California doing things that dudes usually do. His first book, Things, will be out soon from somewhere awesome. Things are always what they seem. tjisadude.tumblr.com

I think I sleep in a peel that fits me better than a collar

             by

                                      T.J. Lyons

This poem came from my experience living as a banana in a Safeway for nine days before the produce people noticed me, and then they marked me down. An old woman with a pegleg bought me. This will appear soon in the ebook, The Wind Cannot Remove the Stench in My Bones, with art by Andrew Jurado.

note: I’ve started this feature up as a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing. I mean it’s astonishing how they are able to get masterpieces of such stature out to the masses on an almost daily basis. But, some poems, though formidable in their own right, aren’t quite right for that pantheon. And, so I’m planning on bridging the gap. A kind of complementary series. Enjoy!

Alexandra Naughton does a lot of things and her name is very search engine friendly. Her first book, I Will Always Be Your Whore, was published by Punk Hostage Press in January, 2014.

     Love Song #1

      [Ava Adore]

             by

                                                                    Alexandra Naughton

Someone: “HTML Giant is so sexist…”

Nigel Tufnel: “What’s wrong with bein sexy?”
 
 

note: I’ve started this feature up as a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing. I mean it’s astonishing how they are able to get masterpieces of such stature out to the masses on an almost daily basis. But, some poems, though formidable in their own right, aren’t quite right for that pantheon. And, so I’m planning on bridging the gap. A kind of complementary series. Enjoy!

Russell Jaffe runs the Strange Cage reading series in Iowa City and his website is russelljaffeusa.com

untitled from STUMBLE X THE AIR STASIS BREATH

                        by

               Russell Jaffe

I wrote the untitled poems in STUMBLE X THE AIR STASIS BREATH in winter. I tried hard to do a minimalist take on poetry as a lifelong proud maximalist. Now that chap-sized collection is a part of a bigger as-yet-unpublished manuscript called LOVER TO and is retitled INTROVERT TO. Everything you know is wrong.

note: I’ve started this feature up as a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing. I mean it’s astonishing how they are able to get masterpieces of such stature out to the masses on an almost daily basis. But, some poems, though formidable in their own right, aren’t quite right for that pantheon. And, so I’m planning on bridging the gap. A kind of complementary series. Enjoy!

Penny Goring lives in London. She makes things, and collaborates with Hella Trol Buzy to make other things.

please make me love you

              by Penny Goring

 


i wrote it on new years day. i used that can be my next tweet, getting computer generated mashups of my recent tweets, then reshuffling, discarding, and adding words. when a line is done i tweet it. because: it’s faster than opening another tab, it makes writing less lonely, it’s interesting to see what lines get favd/retweeted/ignored, and seeing my lines in the twit stream helps me get distance. when i felt like i’d made enough, i copy/pasted each tweet into openoffice and did edits. i like repetition, variations. i feel self-indulgent when i write lists – it is a falling. on new years day i wanted to fall in love.
 

note: I’ve started this feature up as a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing. I mean it’s astonishing how they are able to get masterpieces of such stature out to the masses on an almost daily basis. But, some poems, though formidable in their own right, aren’t quite right for that pantheon. And, so I’m planning on bridging the gap. A kind of complementary series. Enjoy!