Live Nude Poems

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 ...

It's Thomas Patrick Levy 's Please Don't Leave Me Scarlett Johannson .  Give it a purchase and a nice review somewhere. Here's why: O Scarlett I couldn’t look you in the eyes at the diner because you were wearing your apron like a too-small bath towel and I just knew you had a blue Chevy S-10 in the parking lot and my god you were certainly the sexiest person I’ve ever seen carrying a slice of pie to a booth in the back room and even then I knew that you were not real but I kept wiping these drops of coffee off my chin and kept looking around as if there were someone other than you to look at and finally when I left you came after me moving in a rush that smelled of purple candy and when I turned around you were already in your truck and the radio was already moaning MY HEART IS IN MY SHOES and your small fingers were holding a cigarette out the open window and you left me alone with the spatter of wetness your truck’s exhaust left on the cement and I swear the...

I heard about this on a poetry listserv from one his close friends.  It doesn't seem to have hit the mainstream media yet. This is a fairly recent article  by John Penner celebrating the collected poems. It's a sad damned day for me. BERKELEY — In a spacious, humane skilled- nursing  home, a man sits with his elderly neighbors arrayed in their wheelchairs as  Louis Armstrong  and  Ella Fitzgerald  sing. Several guests arrive to see the man, and after the last note of "Cheek to Cheek," one of them takes up a microphone and reads a poem. The reader, startled by a resident's pained moans of distress, stumbles over a word or two of "Looking at Pittsburgh From Paris." He finishes, and the man brightens in his chair and points at his heart, mouthing to a visitor holding his arm, "Me?" Yes, Jack Gilbert. That's yours. The poet is 87 and small in his wheelchair, mostly unable to talk, his brain diminished by disease. He is dying. But as...

Eggs from Anywhere The codicil to my third will (the official one) reads: One, don't give nothing to anybody. Take the money in cash and throw it under the mud-packed wheels of your car in the bumfuckingest place you can find. If you can find a place that was on reality TV, cool. Two, don't eat the nachos from Chili's or the eggs from anywhere; they are related in that ingestion might kill a weak woman or a tweaker man. I wish the birds would not twitter in my ear when I make decisions. It's fucked up enough in here. I wish for you, number three, the magic number, that all the days of your life you will find roses in the tassels of your horse's mane billowing out into better metaphor and a landslide of clean fill that temblors down the back roads of the choked creeks that yield orange rocks, no fish but the pretty stones stained with runoff and the greasy pizza pieces left over by a million students who sit on the banks ...

Will disappear in a few days: *poof*

This is what's going to occupy some of my time for the next couple months. Over 30K people are enrolled in this free class. Check it out. https://class.coursera.org/modernpoetry/class/index