heh heh

Poetry Brothel in the New York Post

heh heh. that's me and my husband at center. John is the mc. three of the others in the pic were my grad students in poetry at one time, at the New School, and the others here are mostly MFAs from the New School. great young poets and among the other poetry whores not shown here. isn't it hilarious and great?  most of the books in the shot are mine, though I am holding the poetry book just published by one of my insanely talented former student, Amy Lawless, who is also a poetry whore but couldn't get away from work that day.  we'll all be there this friday night.

paler shade of pink

[take two] A Lesson for Anvryone (somewhere between anyone and everyone)

Before household furnishings were generally mass-produced and mass-transported, there were specialized annual markets and people traveled long distances to queue up to see the latest goods.  It suited the established townships to keep this system and they kept people from marketing new items at other locations and at other times in the year.  Though it was the men who did most of the line-standing, it was the women who led the eventual revolt, and thereby brought together the spark of industrialism and the bone dry tinder of romantic individualism.  By selling and purchasing used wares, people could avoid the lines, reject the hegemony, and eventually create a underground sales in the prohibited new wares by cleverly decorating them to appear old.  Though the original political and economic meanings have been forgotten, the antiques movement still hints of people who refuse the queues and enjoy trying to tell the fake from the real.

And that's where we get the word Anti ques.   (Yes, I am only kidding.  This is all nonsense I made up for that dumb joke.  I feel a little silly a lot lately, certainly since I joined the whim writers and gave myself up to whimsy.)

The expression on his tiny face reminds me of our tiny planet.

Alone and dyspeptic the paralegals ran through their aces and started on their kings, two of a kind, hypo allergenic and hypnotic.  Not it.  

Flour pour?

jump

Is everything OK?  Is it time to jump over all my inner fences?  Have I feasted on the goo inside?  I on honeydew have fed and drunk the milk of paradise.

Sometime before the revolution I got into the habit of getting into the costumes of nuns.   Who among us have not?  None.  

Since then I have allowed the giraffes on the labels on avocados to talk to me.  I don't talk back, but I do pay attention.  

Jump.  I'm so glad for you that you don't have to feel my emotions right now.  They are a lot like a riot.  You are one lucky son of a bitch.

Is to twitter to crow, or to hawk?  The classic tweet: I taught I taw a puddy cat.

A Bad Day

I am having a bad bad day.

4-20

Clues are the new cluelessness.

Think

of panthers

and phlame ingoes.  In the.

A finger all its

own.

A cosmo?  Not?

I think of a coddled piglet. 

Sometimes messy, often warshed.

Sour cream in your

borscht.  

Day is the new night.

Spring has popped this cherry tree potential to kinetic.

You heard it here first.

First foist luster on an urchin and Buster lost her.

Cardinals are tweeting. Tweet tweeting.

I am curious pink

Is it mystic to be cryptic?  

In a crypt there's little mist,

but what is missed is Misty.

springing

spring is about to hit puberty

stand back!

No Hemlock Rock

I'm sad about Deborah Digges, another suicide of a poet of renown.  Cut it out people.  

No Hemlock Rock

Don’t kill yourself. Don’t kill yourself.
Don’t. Eat a donut, be a blown nut.
That is, if you’re going to kill yourself,
stand on a street corner rhyming
seizure with Indonesia, and wreck it with
racket. Allow medical terms.
Rave and fail. Be an absurd living ghost,
if necessary, but don’t kill yourself.

Let your friends know that something has
passed, or be glad they’ve guessed.
But don't kill yourself. If you stay, but are
bat crazy you will batter their hearts
in blooming scores of anguish; but kill
yourself, and hundreds of other people die.

Poison yourself, it poisons the well;
shoot yourself, it cracks the bio-dome.
I will give badges to everyone who’s figured
this out about suicide, and hence
refused it. I am grateful. Stay. Thank
you for staying. Please stay. You
are my hero for staying. I know
about it, and am grateful you stay.

Eat a donut. Rhyme opus with lotus.
Rope is bogus, psychosis. Stay.
Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus.
Dare to not kill yourself. I won’t either.

Poem for a rainy April evening

History

Even Eve, the only soul in all of time
to never have to wait for love,
must have leaned some sleepless nights
alone against the garden wall
and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild
and wished to trade-in all of Eden
to have but been a child.

In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace,
that she might have a story of herself to tell
in some other place.

From my book The Next Ancient World.

If you come to this, come say Hi to me.

Tonight's Event

Library of Dust

go here and see one of the cans in which were stored the cremains of uncollected patients of a state mental institution. Look here too.

The event tonight has a big line of luminaries in different arts and sciences talking about the book of these by David Maisel.

The book is called Library of Dust.

what made us stuck in traffic

i guess i'm my own worst architect

I see the difficulties, but I still want to live in this house.

work song

I should be workin on the Lobo

but I'm tired

and I'm dreaming I'm a hobo

on the rails

but I drill my days to the Lobo

yes, I drill my long spring day to the Lobo

yes, I'm working at the Lobo

and I'm tired.

yawn

Something I think about a lot.

Where did Philip Larkin get his title for “This Be The Verse” (They fuck you up your mum and dad)? Consider Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem”:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

So we have to figure that “they fuck you up your mum and dad” was the verse that Larkin was asking to have engraved on his tomb. It didn't happen. The grave reads “Philip Larkin, writer,” and yet “This Be the Verse,” is in fact the mental headstone by which most people locate the memory of the poet. Usually when one small piece so dominates a career, we in the know all think “Bah! Really? ‘Blowin in the wind’? ‘Aooo Werewoves of London. Aooo.” But here, in a clear code, Larkin has told us by the purview of his title that this, in fact, be the verse dude wants ‘graved on his grave. So it all worked out.

more weather

Randolph Scott

There is an old west, an old south, and old east money, but you have to leave the country for an old north.

the weather

it is raining

here a small dinosaur is several inches off the surface of the earth

here she splashes back down to the planet

and that is why they call it spring.

Wednesday posts on Best American Poetry

Dear Fonz

I post on wednesdays on the Best American Poetry blog.  This time I wrote about a poem that demonstrates an aspect of reality and meaning that is not easy to communicate outside poetry.   

Jennifer