Live Nude Poems

Watch this space. . .new poetry for NaPoWriMo!

It'll disappear in a few days; get it while you can. *poof*

This book, and 'The Ay' look extremely interesting. Joan Houlihan’s third book,  The Us , is a fifty-one page sequence of poems recounting the story of an imagined pre-historical culture. The narrative focuses on one of the culture’s members in particular—in a sense, its first true individual—“ay.” Although the book is mythological in its scope, it is lyric rather than epic in its approach, proceeding not with heroic pomp and encyclopedic comprehensiveness but instead with lyric delicacy and attention to carefully chosen particulars.  The Us  is not monumental, nor is it meant to be. The Us  begins with a table of contents, an “Argument” (which is in fact a synopsis), and a list of the cast of characters. These three elements serve as guide to a vaguely familiar yet unnamed country and time where the living is primitive and the people’s speech is rendered in an English unlike any known before—a broken, thorny idiom that scrambles the linearity we associ...

Edward Field is a new discovery of mine, and here's a representative poem, both funny and odd, like most of his work that I've read. Curse of the Cat Woman by  Edward Field It sometimes happens that the woman you meet and fall in love with is of that strange Transylvanian people with an affinity for cats. You take her to a restaurant, say, or a show, on an ordinary date, being attracted by the glitter in her slitty eyes and her catlike walk, and afterward of course you take her in your arms, and she turns into a black panther and bites you to death. Or perhaps you are saved in the nick of time, and she is tormented by the knowledge of her tendency: that she daren't hug a man unless she wants to risk clawing him up. This puts you both in a difficult position, panting lovers who are prevented from touching not by bars but by circumstance: you have terrible fights and say cruel things, for having the hots does not give you a sweet temper. One night you are walk...

          We who have sold out are working on dreams of sheetrock and vasoline Don't tell us we are shallow We were denied your lonesome road and guitar music cursed with our own choices which were to go to work           Your smoky nights and poverty they all at least pretended to care when you took a notion to go out and lose your mind We put on our nigger jokes and coveralls laughed as we hated everything, ourselves especially and had no tears           The pretty words, carved rocks and canvas you decorated? We buy tigers or big eyed kids on black velvet           Our curses are not for your freedom or songs of protest They are for the dues we paid They are for turning around one morning and finding we were nobody           Yes we are working on dreams We who have sold out.

It'll disappear soon. *poof*