Clare Pollard, Poet

Clare Pollard is a English poet, and new to me. I read her book Changeling, from Bloodaxe Books in England recently, and was struck immediately by some refashioning of myth that so many people do badly, but not her, thank God, as well as some stark confessional poetry that hit me even more. It's Sextonish, yes, but with a contemporary and more cynical feel. Well worth the time to track it down, this book. Go forth and do what you must: consume.

Adventures in Capitalism

Nothing is real and I want it to stop.

I cut my wrists, but the blood looks like make up.

I slump in toilets snorting cocaine

but it doesn't seem true, just a grimy dream.

I wanted to feel, so had a tattoo done.

I chose a sea-blue anchor near the bone,

then saw it in a tabloid and felt a fake.

Crashed a car dad bought me. Nothing broke.

I went to see Othello swallow a lie

and cried at the end, but it was only a play.

Read some Rimbaud, bought a black polo-neck

and a bottle of absinthe, but felt like a prick.

I whisper 'I love you' and 'Tie me down,'

but all that moan and fisting is just porn.

Signed an online petition but it made no difference.

I bought a house, but it's like playing house.

I own How to be a Domestic Goddess,

but I've never cooked from it, if I'm honest,

and the brownies and aprons are only props

and my wardrobe's a Fancy Dress box,

and I yell at everyone who cares. I hurt them

because I need something to fucking happen.

Comments

Karl Koweski

retaliation it was two weeks after you returned from rehab, dad I found the first vodka bottle, a Smirnoff pint, stashed beneath the driver's seat of your Ford. I propped the empty on the dashboard like a bobble-head. I didn't tell you this then, but... going into my room and leaving my dog-eared copies of Penthouse on my pillow next to the Vaseline... that was a pretty good comeback. Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Day now living in a valley in rural Alabama. His latest collection of poetry from Roadside Press "Abandoned By All Things" is out now.

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disa...

Charles Rammelkamp

Doped with Religion, Sex and TV “Working class hero, my foot,” Darleen spat. “Pampered British rock star’s more like it. He don’t know nothin’ about no working class,” she sneered, “and that Jap witch he married. She’s probly the one who put them ideas in his head.” Darleen and I worked on the assembly line at the Capitol Records plant, putting fresh-pressed LPs into sleeves, the packaged albums into cardboard boxes, the boxes onto pallets for the forklift guy to take them away to the loading dock. “I used to like some of them early songs. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ but you can have this stuff. Working class hero! Who does he think he’s kidding?” I stuffed my impulse to defend Lennon, point out his poverty in postwar Liverpool, the broken family, the absent sailor father; mainly offended by Doreen’s naked racism, pitying her for the misogyny she’d absorbed from generations of farmers on the prairie. I was a college student, working part...

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