Live Nude Poems

Hi. nice to see you. This is an issue near and dear to me, like a deer I shot. But I've never shot a deer. And this is why you should never trust a poet, or rather, you should not believe a poem's content is coterminous with the poet's life experience. I am not writing an autobiography in my poems. If I could even decide what I was trying to do with/in a poem, I would be happy. I try not to think while I'm writing or afterward. Or at all, except maybe when revising. More articulate poets--Lynn Melnick/Cate Marvin/Amy King--than I have discussed this. See here and here and here . Some excerpts out of context, but piquing nonetheless: After a poetry reading I gave a couple of months ago, a stranger came up to a male poet I read with and asked him how he landed upon his chosen form for the lyric, “I”-based poems in his book. The same stranger then turned to me and asked, ostensibly in earnest, if I was “okay now.” My poems had him “worried.” I will ge

This is how a poem means, goddamnit. From Toe Good Poetry In those years of your dying I remember our little green desk lamp, its chain broken so it had to be turned off & on by twisting the bulb in its socket. Sometimes it went off by itself & we’d be engulfed in the dark poverty we were born into. That was how I wanted it to be when your breathing stopped. Quick, painless, silent, poor. That is how I wanted it to be . I wanted to be unable see your face & then I could lie & tell myself I was too old to be afraid of the dark, too old to fear Satan’s python penis splitting the atoms of our soul. It’s been six years since you left. I sit beside myself, brought here to these Midlands of the mundane by the shibboleth of the Chevrolet. In the oncologist’s waiting room there are little green desk lamps just like the one we had, but these do not flicker like my health & the health of all in this room seem

ARIEL now on Amazon . Kindle and NOOK to follow.

from Julia Cohen at  http://onthemessiersideofneat.blogspot.com/2013/06/open-letter-to-mark-edmundson.html Dear Mark Edmundson, I read your article, “Poetry Slam,” in the latest issue of  Harper’s and I’d like to respond directly to your “slam” of contemporary poetry by offering the same audience an alternative perspective: Using only brief fragments of single poems from only 9 living poets (including 1 Canadian, 1 Irish, and 1 actually dead)(endnote 1), Mark Edmundson lambasts the current state of American poetry. I think it’s important to bring to the attention of a larger readership the recent misdirected and lazy criticisms lavished upon contemporary poets that distract from the depth, diversity, and relevance of the work itself. Yes, some readers actually seek out and find poetry that is intellectually, emotionally, and relationally vital. There are two basic cause/effect accusations in “Poetry Slam” that are worthwhile to dissect to show the dubious connections and terrifyi

Revere at 92 Degrees Cops swirl the rotary like feral cats or cock- roaches while in the beachhouse bathroom someone is fucking someone or having it out with their violent bowels at 10:30 AM. If I were a horse I’d be split-hoofed but sedate, a little out of my field lathered with ocean spume the dirt of a thousand filled diapers abandoned to sand or caught in kelp washed up from Nahant or the Back Bay or fuck--the Azores? England? On the road opposite the beach cops stop a latino kid on a skateboard (I don’t know why it takes three cars) and send him off in a different direction. My kids are yank- ing at my shorts so we hit the beach sand and broken bottles with the occasional needle or nip bottle. It’s a grand public place America’s first public beach. A horse cop trots along the beach but the horse leaves a sodden dump in front of kids who have nothing to do but play with it while their dark- skinned mothers scream in three different tongues to s

Perverse Cowgirl Know what you’re saying before you say it. Your partner of choice may have an opinion. You must efuckingnunciate carefully so that when you hop on or your partner hops on there needs to be between spasms a careful avoidance of cramp. That’s when you’re talking about something else. A perverse cowgirl, though is someone you want to be next to you in the firefights of life and the enrapturing of the erotic. They are evil when you need them to be and crushingly familiar with your Eros and your Than- atos. If you have kink in you they’ll bring it out. Bells on, and maybe a bit of feathers and the bedroom door firmly set against the eventual creep of your children who will see something that takes years of therapy to unsee and never ever gets forgotten. On your deathbed they will remember and before they cry will think of you in lingerie. O God.

Walking the line I felt a stalwart black eye of the hurricane blindside me at midmorning. Tore down the street 110 miles per only to find my stop at the end of the whine in Gloucester where I dropped off Olson’s now-fenced entry to the Harbor.  A seagull floated me down but I rose like seltzer bubbles all the way to the end, where piers from three centuries ago aggro’ed me into submission. I beat the oxygen to the surface but flailed in the face of the fish company taken over the wharf puked up my brunch and decided to drive up the Cape but lost my way on Bearskin Neck where all the protopoets go for ice cream or to gig their hard drives into submission. Their poet hats are so quaint. I’d like to bust them in the nose.

Hi all. Did you miss me? ... Liars. :-) Here's a new draft in my new conversational style. Scatology and sexism optional, but you know, the fart joke always works. One Last Crap That’s ten pounds of weight I no longer have to try to lose. Do you know how long it takes? To fill up? And I have diverticulisitis or something which cuts divots, fucking DIVOTS! into my colon. I will forever be set upon by diseases I can’t pronounce around my spastic rolling tongue and the fine root canals American dentistry have provided lo these many years but have not yet found a way to stop psychosis. What kind of shit is that? In the future dentists will cure their patients of psychosis with drills and fine-breasted attendants who intentionally brush you as you turn your head to spit blood and juices into the great gaping maw of the American health system.

Weldon Kees  has been gone close to 60 years, but he continues to inspire. The Nebraska-born poet, who also wrote fiction, composed jazz, and produced experimental films, is the animating spirit behind  Kathleen Rooney ’s book  Robinson Alone  (Gold Wake Press, 2012). In her new collection, Rooney pays homage to Kees’s best-known work, the four Robinson poems that he published before disappearing in July 1955. (His car was discovered in a parking lot near the Golden Gate Bridge, his body never found.) James Reidel, author of  Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), interviewed Rooney for the Poetry Foundation. They spoke about why Kees is an invitational writer, what Nickelodeon has to do with poetry, and the aesthetic elegance of disappearance. Robinson was considered a doppelgänger of Kees, an urban and urbane Robinson Crusoe. Why write an entire book of post-Robinson poems? The Robinson series is one of Kees’s projects that I w