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Posts tagged "poetry"

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Inner Resources It feels good to love our country. We must not say so. I’m divided by a love of our millions of brilliant inventions and how I’ll dumbly sniff and rub each one until I’ve figured out how I can use it for that other thing. Just like a brilliant inventor I too have a body so I know everything’s invented to pleasure a body. I was born to this country and all of it was entranced by my tiny fingers and then I learned where I could put them. Before I was born there was sniffing and rubbing and it formed a tiny unity. Already it was getting too big to call by one name. It was becoming a collection of purposes. Which is like calling the sky a collection of purposes because stars exist. This is why I write little notes to myself reminding myself to take all the notes out of my pockets before sleep. The notes say look at the sky and when I remember to do it I feel very American. I feel American when I want to be able to rub up against what I’m pretty sure is that planet. Planets exist. They hold the names we gave them inside them like a breath. I need to remember to look up the names of the planets I’m seeing. I’m fairly certain of what I’m seeing. It’s too bright to be anything else. This edition of BOMBlog’s Word Choice brought to you by poet Laura Eve Engel and artist Coke O’Neal.

Inner Resources

It feels good to love our country.
We must not say so. I’m divided by a love
of our millions of brilliant inventions
and how I’ll dumbly sniff and rub each one
until I’ve figured out how I can use it for that
other thing. Just like a brilliant inventor I too
have a body so I know everything’s invented
to pleasure a body. I was born to this country
and all of it was entranced by my tiny fingers
and then I learned where I could put them.
Before I was born there was sniffing and rubbing
and it formed a tiny unity. Already it was getting
too big to call by one name. It was becoming
a collection of purposes. Which is like calling the sky
a collection of purposes because stars exist.
This is why I write little notes to myself
reminding myself to take all the notes out
of my pockets before sleep. The notes say look
at the sky and when I remember to do it I feel
very American. I feel American when I want
to be able to rub up against what I’m pretty sure
is that planet. Planets exist. They hold the names
we gave them inside them like a breath. I need
to remember to look up the names of the planets
I’m seeing. I’m fairly certain of what I’m seeing.
It’s too bright to be anything else.

This edition of BOMBlog’s Word Choice brought to you by poet Laura Eve Engel and artist Coke O’Neal.

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submitted by bombmagazine

Pinky’s Rule, by Amy Sillman and Charles Bernstein, is a seven-minute animated drawing. The soundtrack features Sillman reading Bernstein’s poem. In making the work, the collaborators went back and forth, toggling from image to poem and poem to image, so that it is impossible to say which came first. All the images bounce off the poem and the poem is constantly grappling with and extending the graphics. Sillman made more than 2000 images for the film.

(Source: bombsite.com)

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submitted by bombmagazine

The Hare There might have been an invisible sort of drug inside my bag. The hound was trying to chew right through it, but it was hard-shell, and I imagined the drug, heavy-lidded, pulling its head inside like a tortoise. TSA, whose necks were strong and swanlike, seemed to have some questions for me. L——? they said through bee-stung lips. Are you L——?, which in my mind was French for she. I was quite the globe-trotter then, and the fact that I was using Le Lièvre’s passport had slipped my mind. What’s wrong, L——? they said. You in a rush or something?, and I laughed, and I told them I was not. Yes, there was a drug, I am certain now, but like I said, it was invisible, and I tried my best not to sweat it. The movie on the plane had been about intrigue, only slightly softer focused and more posed. The leading lady was considered quite a catch for the cover of a magazine. She had some sort of evocative name, like Tarragon, like Thyme. It’s oregano, I told TSA. This, even though I knew they could not see it, could not smell it either, could never feel the whisper of its Ziploc against their elegant cheeks. I tried to remember whether this drug slowed things down or sped them up. It must have sped them up, I decided, despite the way it sometimes lagged like a tortoise, for before I even knew it, I was home with my head on my pillow, and it was hardly half past ten. —Poetry and art both by Matt Runkle, in the latest edition of WORD CHOICE

The Hare

There might have been an invisible sort of drug inside my bag. The hound was trying to chew right through it, but it was hard-shell, and I imagined the drug, heavy-lidded, pulling its head inside like a tortoise.

TSA, whose necks were strong and swanlike, seemed to have some questions for me. L——? they said through bee-stung lips. Are you L——?, which in my mind was French for she. I was quite the globe-trotter then, and the fact that I was using Le Lièvre’s passport had slipped my mind.

What’s wrong, L——? they said. You in a rush or something?, and I laughed, and I told them I was not.

Yes, there was a drug, I am certain now, but like I said, it was invisible, and I tried my best not to sweat it.

The movie on the plane had been about intrigue, only slightly softer focused and more posed. The leading lady was considered quite a catch for the cover of a magazine. She had some sort of evocative name, like Tarragon, like Thyme.

It’s oregano, I told TSA.

This, even though I knew they could not see it, could not smell it either, could never feel the whisper of its Ziploc against their elegant cheeks.

I tried to remember whether this drug slowed things down or sped them up. It must have sped them up, I decided, despite the way it sometimes lagged like a tortoise, for before I even knew it, I was home with my head on my pillow, and it was hardly half past ten.

—Poetry and art both by Matt Runkle, in the latest edition of WORD CHOICE

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submitted by bombmagazine

I did a lot of fishing when I was a little younger—surfcasting—and it’s like when you get a strike. Something heavy and alive is on the end of the line and you don’t know what it is but you can feel the power of it and you have to pull it in. When you feel you’ve got a line that’s pulling a lot of emotional freight with it, then you know you’ve probably started a poem. —Harvey Shapiro, BOMB 2010

I did a lot of fishing when I was a little younger—surfcasting—and it’s like when you get a strike. Something heavy and alive is on the end of the line and you don’t know what it is but you can feel the power of it and you have to pull it in. When you feel you’ve got a line that’s pulling a lot of emotional freight with it, then you know you’ve probably started a poem.

—Harvey Shapiro, BOMB 2010

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submitted by bombmagazine

The ultimate line that poetry has continually crossed is between the living and the dead, or the visible and invisible worlds. When I read the long-gone, the nearly-gone, the newly-gone, or the contemporary writers who are unread, unsung, under-appreciated and misread, my job is to animate their work, to bring it to life, and to bring it into my room (call it my body, my nervous system, my consciousness). And as that work has been brought to another life within my consciousness, bent and refracted in my own voice, I can call them back. —Peter Gizzi, BOMB 2011

The ultimate line that poetry has continually crossed is between the living and the dead, or the visible and invisible worlds. When I read the long-gone, the nearly-gone, the newly-gone, or the contemporary writers who are unread, unsung, under-appreciated and misread, my job is to animate their work, to bring it to life, and to bring it into my room (call it my body, my nervous system, my consciousness). And as that work has been brought to another life within my consciousness, bent and refracted in my own voice, I can call them back.

—Peter Gizzi, BOMB 2011

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submitted by bombmagazine

I want to put poetry in danger and put myself in danger and to write the sort of poetry I would not be ashamed to read to people in danger. —Mairéad Byrne, BOMB 2010, artwork by Leigh Van Duzer

I want to put poetry in danger and put myself in danger and to write the sort of poetry I would not be ashamed to read to people in danger.

—Mairéad Byrne, BOMB 2010, artwork by Leigh Van Duzer

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submitted by bombmagazine

Car Music Why don’t you just say one of your prayers, she sighs on the way to the airport, passing through the Virginia hills, something hidden and dazed in her look like the singer’s corrosive voice smoldering out of the radio. When we stop to stretch in a grove of dark pines she looks like she’s trying to remember something standing beside the fender and bending the wing-mirror over, daylight the color of tapwater, silver-gray like the sky. I look okay in this type of light, she says no one can see my crow’s feet. I can’t decide if she’s flirting with me or trying to pick a fight. What if I tell her I’m not afraid of her midnight rages and vanities? What if I give her these skinny violets and say get back in the car? —Joseph Millar in BOMB’s brand new Word Choice, with art by Nader Ebrahimi

Car Music

Why don’t you just say one of your prayers,
she sighs on the way to the airport,

passing through the Virginia hills,
something hidden and dazed in her look

like the singer’s corrosive voice
smoldering out of the radio.

When we stop to stretch
in a grove of dark pines

she looks like she’s trying
to remember something

standing beside the fender
and bending the wing-mirror over,

daylight the color of tapwater,
silver-gray like the sky.

I look okay in this type of light, she says
no one can see my crow’s feet.

I can’t decide if she’s flirting with me
or trying to pick a fight.

What if I tell her I’m not afraid
of her midnight rages and vanities?

What if I give her these skinny violets
and say get back in the car?

—Joseph Millar in BOMB’s brand new Word Choice, with art by Nader Ebrahimi

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submitted by bombmagazine

I like the idea of a traveling sound, like a siren, how its pitch shifts in relation to the observer. —Ben Lerner, BOMB 2010, artwork by Daniel Gerwin

I like the idea of a traveling sound, like a siren, how its pitch shifts in relation to the observer.

—Ben Lerner, BOMB 2010, artwork by Daniel Gerwin

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submitted by bombmagazine

It’s like dogsledding, the language being the dogs who aren’t so much driven as they are given the direction; the force is entirely their own, though. The poet, of course, being the sled driver.  —Carl Phillips, BOMB 76, 2001

It’s like dogsledding, the language being the dogs who aren’t so much driven as they are given the direction; the force is entirely their own, though. The poet, of course, being the sled driver.
 
—Carl Phillips, BOMB 76, 2001

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submitted by bombmagazine

One big and comical mistake many poets make is to feel that they are somehow special or different for feeling a sense of aloneness, which leads to the melancholy moody stereotypes for which poets have for centuries been sometimes justly accused.  —Matthew Zapruder, BOMB 2010

One big and comical mistake many poets make is to feel that they are somehow special or different for feeling a sense of aloneness, which leads to the melancholy moody stereotypes for which poets have for centuries been sometimes justly accused.
 
—Matthew Zapruder, BOMB 2010

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