I like it best when my brain is pulled like a fitted sheet, pleated at corners in tension.
These books are from different places and perspectives and yet they all aim to provoke a change, not give a comfort.
Currently reading, in part thanks to Black Squirrel Books,
Texistence (2008, Xerox Sutra Editions) by Geof Huth and mIEKAL aND,
p. 36, 39
fossilitate
azzle-addled
The words aim to make new words. With new words, perhaps we can move towards new frames of perception, build towards newer still. Or at least get to the same, but faster in the short-hand compression of a word.
Direct and Devious Ways (1993,The Muses Co) by Katharine Beeman,
p. 17
3rd position
I was sure there were men like that. Men who only existed for women’s pleasure, to give women pleasure in one specific way. Men who considered themselves finger virtuosos. Men who had studied 1001 ways to caress nipples. Men who did tongue exercises every day.
I knew they existed because nearly everything you could think of did.
The poems range from race unity, unions, deforestation, canoeing, surrealists who omitted female voice and action. They’re lively.
Bumping into her writing was a surprise. I have her chapbook from a few years ago and hadn’t realized she was publishing her writing around the time I was learning to write cursive. There’s a high tension energy, even in her poem to Milton Acorn’s funeral,
we howled, love
love lllooovvveee
so that even you could hear
all the way back a monht ago
before you were underground.
Against Paradise by Shawna Lemay (2001, M&S),
p. 7,
Make arrangements to have my remains
disguised as
holy knick-knacks.
I’ll design reliquaries of gilt and smoked glass
lined with plush crimson.
Wrist bone, fifth rib, index finger
Rather than revisit history and leave it intact but in updated syntax she loops back and questions as well, p 30 the poem starts conversationally with a fragment. We pop into the debate underway.
Speaking of confessions.
I rather think of Peggy Guggenheim more
as a foiled Cleopatra
than the female Casanova.
I don’t know the point of reference but I have reason to find out. The writing is fierce. It doesn’t aim to incant itself to sleep. It doesn’t ride an idea until it peters out then with a spark of an ant’s flame-thrower ending. It may pipe up at any point in the poem. It doesn’t read as uneven so much as alive.
and A Shropshire Lad (1923 edition from Grant Richards Ltd) by A.E. Housman
p. 7
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover ;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad : when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough to sleep.
He makes me laugh too as in LXII
“‘Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme/ your friends to death before their time.
Come pipe a tune to dance to, lad.// Why if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry,[…]oh many a peer of England brews
livier liquor than the Muse/ And Malt does more than Milton can
[…]And nothing now remained to do/but begin the game anew.”
Other books are blipping thru these should do me for a couple days.