Sandra Simonds lives a pretty boring life in Tallahassee, Florida. She works as a professor in Thomasville, Georgia. She is always tired. Sometimes she parks her car in random parking lots and just sits there and listens to music.
by Sandra Simonds
He doesn’t love you It’s just a way for him
to feel less lonely in his love for me Hope you got some
money to take care of your AIDS and keep
your ignorant mouth shut Hope that you end up
committing suicide If you care
about your life at all you will SHUT THE
FUCK UP WHORE You greasy slimy jstinky
mentally Jewish nasty whore Kill yourself
cunt I will FIND YOU (Namaste) If you care about
your life at all (Namaste) you will SHUT THE
FUCK UP WHORE I am tall witty thin blonde Sorry
If I see one FUCKING THING about me anywhere I am coming
to your house Men of power and influence have been
and are attracted to me You’re writing is
GARBAGE Yes people in the world
Move They
Change You moron you can’t even pronounce “koan”
Sometimes even beautiful poets who come
from money such as myself fall in love
with poor white trash alcoholics and go the south
and live with them a few years Enjoy the charity people
who want their dicks sucked Women get
divorced It is
awful DOG don’t give your kids AIDS
You should commit suicide Believe it! I’m rooting
for you You only had them
so you could be a “mommy poet” (Namaste)
In some sense, this is a conceptual piece of writing in that it takes verbatim language delivered in one context (the stalker to me) and subverts it by delivering it back (me to the world) in an entirely different context/ new audience. It moves from the private (email) to the public (website) and in this sense it moves from the relationship of abuse (me and the stalker) to the relationship of reality/ sympathy and understanding (me and my other social relations). I would have never dreamed that I would write this sort of poem a year ago, but after having been stalked and harassed by this person for so long, after having called the police, after having ignored the stalker and fought back, I felt like writing the poem was my last recourse.
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!
Tags: Poem-A-Day, Sandra Simonds
Seth Abramson’s “digging” what i’m “bringing”:
“The awesome power of metamodernistic conceptualism–particularly its reconfigurative function–is on display today at HTMLGiant. (Two of the four poems published in this new series have been works of metamodernistic conceptualism, and three have been works of expressive conceptualism in general terms, so I’m very much digging what Rauan Klassnik is bringing here.) In this case, it’s Sandra Simonds composing a poem comprising sentences and phrases sent to her by a long-time stalker.”
Not sure why something being a work of “conceptualism” should be the reason for liking it. ?
(On a side note–and not that you’re a contagiophore–, what’s up with Abramson Derangement Syndrome? Less widespread but more entertaining than Franzenfreude.)
i am certainly a contagiowhore — but, seriously, yeah, Seth kind of is the plague for some people (even though we know, and Homer knew too, that in actual fact rats carry the plague) …
it’s a strange world, man
Sandra hasn’t written her own work since her first (very bad and boring) book. It is now a fact that everybody knows.
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