T. C. Tolbert

 from Word Problems

1. X is a filthy fucking slut. This can be proven by the wear in certain creases on X’s clothes and on X’s knees. X owns you. X is your daddy. X is going to hold you down and fill all your holes up with cum. X is spread out for you and wants you to take it. X is going to slap your face then beat your pussy up.

2. A tree branch, or a broom handle, or a baseball bat is inserted into the anus. X is not afraid. Sitting on the grandmother’s porch, X knows the difference between Kleinian phantasy and daydream. If 72% of the time, this brings X to orgasm (a splitting euphoria in which X’s voice becomes unrecognizable to itself), and 47% of the time this results in a delayed 36 hour period of intense suicidal ideation (down from 68% two years ago and 88% two years before that), when will X be loved?

3. As a child, X favored (in temperament, mannerism, and embodiment) the mother. As an adult, X is the spitting image (a bastardization of the phrase “spit and image”) of the father. If miracle and mirror share the same root, who must X forgive? And who did X kill first?

4. X’s body is covered with 8% psoriasis, 11% tattoos, 23% fat, and 62% hair. If X is a man, how much of his body is livable? If X is a woman, who covered her body with shame?

5. On Monday, X ate a banana with peanut butter for breakfast, a Cliff bar for lunch, and 4 pieces of fudge and 2 Reese’s for dinner. On Tuesday, X hiked 10 miles and ate Greek yogurt with fresh fruit, cashews, an apple, a Cliff bar, and pasta. On Wednesday, X started the day with red velvet cake. If food addiction is twice as likely in women who experienced physical or sexual abuse before 18, is X a woman or a man?

Nick Flynn

 

Rodney Phillips: All of your three published books are really different. Can you please describe each of them in a sentence? 

Nick Flynn: I think you should describe each one as well, then we can have a contest. And besides, there are four books: 

Some Ether:

Blurb: an act of shameless self-mytho-poeticising, where Flynn tries to subvert his narrative tendencies by forays into invented "forms."

Over-riding emotion while writing it: Desperation. 

Soundtrack: Plastic Ono Band.

Blind Huber:

Blurb: Hoping to break out of il nuovo confessione, Flynn writes a series of persona poems, which seems to allow messier emotions (self-pity, bitterness, small-heartedness) more free-range, but sends him headlong into pathetic fallacy hell.

Over-riding emotion while writing it: Embarrassment.

Soundtrack: Philip Glass, The Photographer.

A Note Slipped under the Door: 

Blurb: The money-maker, which sank like a stone.

Over-riding emotion while writing: Self-righteousness.

Soundtrack: Donna Summer, I Feel Love

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: 

Blurb: a dodgy slip back into the myth factory, where Flynn appears, or wants to appear, to be free of self-pity and judgment, and to show his shadow side, yet finds it is all still a construct, that the self is a persona, that memory is fiction.

Over-riding emotion while writing it: "This is a big mistake."

Soundtrack: Johnny Cash, The Man Comes Around.

Layli Long Soldier

 

Obligations 2

                                                    As we

                                        embrace          resist

                          the future       the present      the past

             we work          we struggle          we begin          we fail

​

to understand       to find        to unbraid        to accept        to question

 

              the grief          the grief           the grief          the grief

                          we shift         we wield           we bury​

                                    into light               as ash

                                                       across our faces

Joshua Rivkin

Cy Twombly in Italy, 1957.Credit...Elizabeth Stokes

I came to Chalk with an adoring familiarity with Twombly’s work but almost no knowledge of his life. He would have wanted it this way, as he was mysterious with reporters and often secretive with even his closest friends. When the writer Edmund White asked him what his parents did, Twombly said, “They were Sicilian ceramicists.” (This was a lie.) When asked how many paintings would be in his MoMA show, he said, without blinking, “Forty thousand.” The Twombly Foundation, under the presidency of del Roscio, is faithful to the artist’s recalcitrance. Yet Rivkin takes the position that “Life and art are never separate conversations. It’s easy to read—and overread—the biographical in Twombly’s art. He practically dares you.”

Rivkin’s torrid relationship with the Twombly Foundation becomes, by necessity, a part of the plot. After several threats, the foundation refused to license any images of Twombly or his work for Chalk. (The few photographs that do appear were authorized by other estates and archives.) In the end, the foundation (more specifically, del Roscio) was appalled and annoyed by Rivkin’s project. Attorneys appear. Threatening letters appear.

Yet part of the excellence of this biography (I respectfully refuse Rivkin’s refusal of the term) is that it alchemizes this challenge into an asset. The book is more personal than a biography because the biographer, who is already an accomplished poet, offers details from his own life as they mirror that of the artist. Though it may sound like misplaced exhibitionism, Rivkin’s vulnerability is a gift. Because so many details of Twombly’s life were erased, withheld, or obscured, Rivkin’s brief autobiographical interludes seem to transform those erasures from an absence to a presence. In this respect, at least, Rivkin is right to say that Chalk is not a biography. Portraiture is always an act of triangulation; a biography, no matter how removed the writer may try to be, is always covered in fingerprints.

Twombly, at once Southern and queer and closeted and famous . . .

Layli Long Soldier

from "38"

 Here, the sentence will be respected.

I will compose each sentence with care by minding what the rules of writing dictate.

For example, all sentences will begin with capital letters.

Likewise, the history of the sentence will be honored by ending each one with appropriate punctuation such as a period or question mark, thus bringing the idea to (momentary) completion.

You may like to know, I do not consider this a “creative piece.”

In other words, I do not regard this as a poem of great imagination or a work of fiction.

Also, historical events will not be dramatized for an interesting read.

Therefore, I feel most responsible to the orderly sentence; conveyor of thought.

That said, I will begin:

You may or may not have heard about the Dakota 38.

Kaveh Akbar

Calling a Wolf a Wolf (impatient)

Kaveh Akbar

                  PORTRAIT OF THE ALCOHOLIC WITH MOTHS AND RIVER

​                              some moths don’t even have mouthparts using
                              only stored caterpillar energy
                              their lives are measured in days scissoring
                              tributaries        for every you there
                              are a hundred moths luxuriously
                              dying their spirits spoiled by excess

what you lack and the punishment for your
                                                                        lacking are the same          paling tulips gray-
  ing fingernails a body nearly stops
                                                                                            then doesn’t I have seen it a man slips
                                                                       beneath a blanket emerges clutching
                                                                      himself saying this is mine I found it

                              rivers often do the same thing claiming
                              whatever they pour into           cathedrals
                              gardens snakeholes do you see how afraid
                              I am for you          all men are drawn to the
                              black water moonless the quiet drums a
                              name it’s not yours it’s not mine listen

       to make life first you need a dying star
  this seems important with you so close to
    collapsing yourself the mute swan’s final
              burst of song        I know you’ve tried this before
                                                                 when they asked where it hurt you motioned in
                                                                                 a circle to the ground under your feet

​

Joshua Rivkin

 

NEW ECONOMY 

 

A man tries to trade his guitar for a city bus.  
My pick for your passengers. Six strings for sixteen wheels. 

A bride on her wedding day exchanges her love 
for bright weather, a groom exchanges his hands for hers. 

A father offers to trade his family for a hotel’s worth of sleep.  
A sailor offers the Pacific for a hotel’s worth of sex. 

Tonight, the shirt from my back, my singing mouth
my endless praise for your skin or company. 

I’ll give you my stethoscope for a red barn: a doctor.  
I’ll give you my right arm for your left: his patient. 

It’s the inequality of pain a sleepless woman wants 
to give away. Here, take mine, she offers to freight trains 

whistling their replies through the city’s poorest wards: 
Jealousy gets you jealousy. Rage gets you rage. 

“What wouldn’t you offer?” a man asks the pawnshop window.
“What wouldn’t you take?” replies the glass.

 

Rae Armantrout

Care

Dress like you care!

Eat like you care!

Care like you care!

You don’t think

apples just grow on trees,

do you?

•

A fish taps a clam

against a bony knob

of coral

to crack its shell — 

which demonstrates intelligence

yes, but

is the fish

pleased with itself?

•

Alone in your crib,

you form syllables.

Are you happy when one

is like another?

Add yourself

to yourself.

Now you have someone.

Joshua Rivkin

 ROOMS INSIDE ROOMS

You. The waves belly up to sand. No You. The ducks dive. You. City kids. They kick a starfish between them. Bravado, wrote a friend, is the work of the gods. We’re fickle as coastlines. A woman with gray hair and binoculars walks over and picks up the sea star – she knows about these things – her fingers fit neatly in the space between the animal’s body and arms. She shows them what they couldn’t know by looking at the topside, its curve and spike, defense and shimmer: nothing is alive inside. You can hold it if you want. Hollow as wind off the bay. Empty vessel, empty room. Cavafy: rooms inside rooms, left vacant by bodies and left full by time: three wicker chairs, two yellow vases, the mirrored wardrobe, the lover’s bed, and the afternoon light slipping from wall to wall to wall – all gone, all here. Past the waves, more waves. The woman leaves the kids to argue over their treasure: take it home or leave it. He holds the sea to his ear. An arriving surf, a bird’s wanting call, a world beyond this one. How lush this absence, how full is this room. Cavafy: They must still be around somewhere, these old things. How we try to leave them. How they call us back: You. You. You.

Anselm Berrigan

 

My father, Ted Berrigan, is primarily known for his poetry, especially his bookThe Sonnets, which reimagined the traditional sonnet from a perspective steeped in the art of assemblage circa the early sixties. He was also an editor, a publisher, and a prose writer—specifically one who worked in the forms of journals and reviews. While his later journals were often written with the expectation of publication—meaning the journal-as-form could be assigned by a magazine editor—his sixties journals are much more internal. In these journals, he’s writing to document his daily life and his consciousness while figuring out how to live, and how to live as a poet, so to speak. These excerpts from his journals were originally published in Michael Friedman’s lovingly edited Shiny magazine in 2000. They were selected by the poet and editor Larry Fagin, who invited me to come to Columbia University’s library, where my father’s journals from the early sixties are archived, and work with him on the selection process. We were looking, as I think of it now, for moments of loud or quiet breakthrough—details, incidents, and points of recognition that contributed to his ongoing formation as a person and poet.

“The Chicago Report,” which narrates a weekend trip from Iowa City to Chicago to attend a reading by Kenneth Koch and Anne Sexton put on by Poetrymagazine, was written in 1968 in the form of a letter to Ron Padgett, a close friend and fellow poet. It was later published in an issue ofThe World, the Poetry Project’s mimeographed magazine, as well as in Nice To See You, an homage book put together by friends after my father’s death in 1983. It may be recognizable as an affable, freewheeling, and at times incendiary piece of first-person satire, filtering the voice of “Ted Berrigan” through the voice of Ted as known by Ron, or vice versa. My father was a working-class Korean War veteran who didn’t feel comfortable in high-class literary circles but did engage them at times, with amusement and a kind of gentle predilection for disruption. 

—Anselm Berrigan

Rodrigo Toscano

 

                                        Fence Books (2022)

“Barricades” writes:

He’s fond of peppering in
“on this side of the barricades”
when speaking political
meaning, his critique of
changes at hand
isn’t coming from the right
meaning, don’t purity spiral
peeps, be stout
allow room for growth
don’t be a gendarme of
revolution, be a
full actor, unafraid
aware that the barricades
can pop up anywhere
in front and back

Rodrigo Toscano

 

At a Bus Stop in El Barrio 

Tha’ vahnahnah go-een to keel joo.

Excuse me?

Tha’ vahnahnah    ...    go-een to keel joo.

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

O’ káy. Sô    ...    vahnahnah haf sostahnence, nô?

Uh — 

O’ káy. Ees troo if  joo haf sostahnence, joo problee leev anothe’ thay?

I suppose so, look — 

Alrigh. If  joo ee tha’ vahnahnah, joo weel be leeving ôp a-hed, righ?

Yeah alright, so?

O’ káy. Are joo thy-een now?

What?

Are joo thy-een now — a’ thees momen?

I hope not.

O’ káy. Ees troo    ...    ôp a-hed — joo thy some poin?

Of course.

Alrigh, sô, vahnahnah poosh you there.

Um.

Tha’ vahnahnah go-een to keel joo, baby.

Rodrigo Toscano

Fence Books (2017)

from Explosion Rocks Springfield (2017)

The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care.

Spartacus Sprinklers (top rail) 

Serial no. 21809A 

Scrap metal yard F-2

Stripped steel tankard 28

Sampson Recyclers Ltd., Pittsfield, MA 

Steelworkers local 4-12026 

Smelting furnace 48

Slab beam rollout batch 81.2014

Semper Fortis Steel Precision Corp, Brooklyn, NY 

Steelworkers local 4-200 

Section cutting station no. 12

Steel cylinder hollow type 2b

Store & send department 4 

Spirit of 76 Commercial Furnishing Corp, Slidell, LA

Steelworkers local 3-275 

Sargon Sprinklers (bottom rail) 

Serial no. 321911B

Sink coating station 12

Sanding unit 25

Seal testing station no. 7

Sprinklers standard specification 29CFR1910.159(b)

Station inspector 13 

Sales packaging room H

Sort and storage garage 4

Second incidence of forklift crushing worker’s toes

Spirit of 76 Personnel Motivation Free Cupcake Fridays director, Chet Baker

Steelworkers local 3-275 chief steward, Marynella Fernandez 

Section 5, clause 2 “Management shall comply with all state and federal standards”

Safety committee grievance no. 78: unannounced station rotations / inadequate training

Staff training regulation arbitration hearing 501.P.36

Sargon Sprinklers 1st annual wet t-shirt contest 

Super Sonic Dance Club, 3rd Floor, Picayune, MS 

RodrigoToscano

    TUCSON (2017)

Ass, in fact, is death

The return of ABBA, is death
In beautiful increments
Kittens grow, leaf twigs snap
Now the moon hovers above. Tease.
A sort of ass, in space
No help from moonlight
In birth, wars, and wooing
There was a blonde, right?
And a brunette, right?
And two kittens in pantsuits
Make that four
Plus, the invisible drummer
And 70’s asses swaying
A totentanz
By the millions

Ass, in fact, is life
The return of ABBA is, well
For the half dead
In beautiful increments
15-inch tires, 30-inch tires
By the moon or sun
Grinding, wearing, thinning
Dusting the roads
Tires oblivious to car frames
Car frames toting asses
Two thousand twenties models
Or styles, or makes
A totentanz
Do you have to look that up?
Really? One tires
Driving for the unstudious

 

Kaveh Akbar

 

Heritage

Reyhaneh Jabbari, a 26-year-old Iranian woman, was hanged on October 25th, 2014, for killing a man who was attempting to rape her.


the body is a mosque borrowed from Heaven     centuries of time

stain the glazed brick    our skin rubs away like a chip

in the middle of an hourglass        sometimes I am so ashamed 


of my sentience how little it matters        angels don't care about humility       

you shaved your head        spent eleven days half-starved in solitary

and not a single divine trumpet wept into song      now it's lonely all over 


I'm becoming more a vessel of memories than a person        it's a myth

that love lives in the heart       it lives in the throat we push it out

when we speak       when we gasp we take a little for ourselves 


in books love can be war-ending       a soldier drops his sword to lie forking oysters

into his enemy's mouth        in life we hold love up to the light

to marvel at its impotence         you said in a letter to Sholeh 


you weren't even killing the roaches in your cell       that you would take them up

by their antennae and flick them through the bars into a courtyard      

where you could see men hammering long planks of cypress into gallows 


the same men who years before threw their rings in the mud       who watered them 

five times daily        who shot blackbirds off almond branches

and kissed the soil at the sight of sprouts       then cursed each other when the stalks 


which should have licked their lips withered dryly at their knees        may God beat

us awake      scourge our brains to life       may we measure every victory

by the momentary absence of pain       there is no solace in history      this is a gift 


we are given at birth     a pocket we fold into at death        goodbye now you mountain      

you armada of flowers         you entire miserable decade in a lump in my throat       

despite all our endlessly rehearsed rituals of mercy       it was you we sent on