Malcolm Tariq

Cento in Which the Narrative Precedes the Lyric

The narrative is a device of authority, control.

It is not unlawful to take someone else’s voice who had little to no voice preceding their narrative authority.

It is, however, unethical to take someone else’s voice who had little to no voice preceding their narrative authority.

This is a matter of ethics.

This is a matter of power.

Some of you reading this have no such ethics, probably because you have a certain amount of power.

In this case, there is power in poetry.

If that is the case, there is power held over and against poetry.

Most of the enslaved were forbidden to learn to read and write.

In this case, the enslaved were forbidden the right to poetry.

Some of the enslaved learned to read and write. Some of the enslaved learned to read and write poetry. In this case, some mastered the lyric in spite of the ways of capitalism.

Again, the lyric is an act of selfhood and self-possession. It should precede narrative.

Alex Dimitrov

More

How again after months there is awe.The most personal moment of the dayappears unannounced. People wear leather.People refuse to die. There are strangerswho look like they could know your name.And the smell of a bar on a cold night,or the sound of traffic as it follows you home.Sirens. Parties. How balconies hold us.Whatever enough is, it hasn’t arrived.And on some dead afternoonwhen you’ll likely forget this,as you browse through the vintageagain and again—there it is,what everyone’s given upjust to stay here. Jeweled hairpins,scratched records, their fast youth.Everything they’ve given upto stay here and find more.

Dan Beachy-Quick

Alcman 89

Translated from the Greek by Dan Beachy-Quick

They are sleeping, mountain-heads, headlands,and the gullies, too—the fallen leaves and the tribe of slow-footedcreatures the dark earth grows—beasts of prey mountain-bred and broodof wild bees and the brutemonsters deep in the deep purple seas:and that flock of omen-giving birds long-winged,they are sleeping, too.
Long before I started translating, those years of trying to learn Ancient Greek, certain words held for me the whole promise of the whole endeavor. I could feel, strange as it might be to say, that certain words held paths within them, and all I really wanted to do was to learn how to walk down those paths. One of those words was the word for poet, ποιητής. It means, simply enough, “maker.” Derived from the noun, the verb form ποιέω translates as you’d expect: “I make.” But verbs in Greek can occur in a voice English doesn’t have, the middle voice. I describe it to myself as Keats describes a laziness so profound the goddesses of Indolent Grace visit him, a state in which body and mind are indistinguishable, that he calls “diligent indolence.” Here it is the verb performs its action against or within itself, and the same word in the middle voice, ποιέεσθαί, would be translated “I consider.” I learned something maybe I always knew, but didn’t know I knew; maybe I learned again, or returned to a kind of knowing, a way of knowing, what a poem had always been for me: the thing that must be built before it can be considered. The poem is the hut thinking lives in; and that thought the poem thinks can live nowhere else but in the poem.
The first time I felt close, years after these early glimmers, was in working on the 89th fragment/poem from Alcman. This poet, born into servitude, claims to have learned his songs from the birds, and singing like the birds, was freed from his bonds; he travelled to Sparta where he led the choirs of virgin boys and girls; and on his death, made citizen of that land. Gentle as a lullaby, that poem puts the world to sleep: mountains, gullies, and trees; beasts of prey and honey bees; the monsters in the deep; and the birds, too. Those birds he calls the “omen-giving long-winged” flock. Yes, “they are sleeping, too.” That last line made me feel it—the thinking in the made-thing, the mind closing around what it has been given as gently as does a hand into which another hand has drifted… The sleep of an endless hour in which the         world ceases all pursuit, bees rest from toil, and even Fate takes a nap. The poem has put in pause all the moves, all that must be done; and something else arises, something outside of time—that path that approaches earthly happiness.

Writing Prompt

Let’s begin with Emerson’s assertions: “Genius is the repair of the decay of things.” It strikes me that ancient poetry offers us a curious way to enact that lovely supposition. The prompt is simple, maybe predictable, but I think could turn toward unexpectedly happy results. Find an ancient poem that time has fragmented—Sappho, Anacreon, Archilochus, Alcman all come immediately to mind. You’ll need to find an edition that preserves the gaps of the original texts; sometimes this is easy to find, sometimes not. The Loeb library will be an immediate resource, which will have the Greek in the pattern in which it has survived the ages, and a quick working back and forth from the English to the translation will allow you to put the words down in approximately the proper place. The challenge then is to fill in the poem, write back into the tatters as a form of repair at the level of genius. Then, lastly, erase the original words, and read what now remains—a reverse of the original damage.

Dan Beachy-Quick

 

Tommye Blount

Arcane Torso on Grindr

We cannot know his legendary head,

now hidden by a peach. Yet his torso,

all ink and Equinox, is backlit from inside

the phone: hard math; a circuitry of low

fires—sexy algorithm. Otherwise

the flexed bicep could not dazzle me so, nor could

his cum-gutter's v, his barely-shaved thighs,

nor his bottle rocket all set to flare.

Not on this phone, he doesn't have any face

pics to trade, nothing above the shoulders.

But his chest—bury my face in that fur!

Would not he, were it not for the cropped selfie,

arouse like a porn star. He says your place

or mine. I must lie about my life.

Sam Riviere

Year of the Rabbit

there is no purer form of advertising
than writing a poem
that's what the monk told me
if I were a conceptual artist
I would make high-budget trailers
of john updike novels but no actual movie
the scene where angstrom drives towards
the end of his life down a street in the suburbs
lined with a type of tree he's never bothered
to identify and laden with white blossoms
reflecting slickly in the windscreen
I would fade in the music
as the old song was fading out
keeping the backing vocals at the same distance
kind of balancing the silence
the word RABBIT appears in 10 foot trebuchet

Sam Riviere

 

My Face Saw Her Magazine

across the moonscapes of skateparks you are 13 yrs old 
& no longer allowed to play with boys / on platform 6 
wearing your amazing cape you are not in fact you 
but someone else / while I'm a guy who mishears lyrics 
resulting in a more beautiful but private understanding
with your dark fringe white shirt & straw hat you are 
the palest goth at the picnic / resolutely uncharmed 
by my very charming friend you are the poster of disinterest 
in bed & matching underwear you are disguising the tunnel 
we dug in the american prison / not answering my texts 
what you are is the briefcase glowing with golden contents 
I realise I can only look in one eye at a time / it is pure 
propaganda the pupil a blot of blackest inkjet ink 
in your luxury woollen garment you are an advertisement 
for luxury woollen garments / & then & then you wink

Caroline Bergvall

 Seafarer, song 1

Let me speak my true journeys own true songs
I can make my sorry tale right soggy truth
sothgied sodsgate some serious wrecan my shipsailing
rekkies tell Hu ic how ache wracked from
travel gedayswindled oft thrownabout bitterly
tested gebanging head keeling at every beating
waves What cursed fool grimly beshipped
couldnt get signs during many a nightwacko
caught between whats gone ok whats coming on
crossing too close to the cliffs Blow wind blow,
anon am I

Seafarer, song 2

Cold gesprung weary worn were my feet frost
bound in the ice-blinding clamour of kulla
city sank further seafaring is seafodder hearthumbling
Could scarcely move or draw my
breath cursed with nightmares gewacked by
seachops gave up all parts of me on gebattered
ship Yet a hungor innan mind stole me to more
weird comas let me let me let me let me freeze
Blow wind blow, anon am I

Keston Sutherland

          Solid in Sexdecasylabics

Beside the open border of the teller station counted on 
that scene erupts apart from its reality below in flight 
to where you let it float between the wicker gaps in sanity 
in grainy resolution on the wall in knots projected fire 
will be fanned to decorate in platitudes and sunlit ash 
that no erotic suspension of the progressive-slide drawer 
ever need produce too much paralysis to shift. The way 
that a broken mind or heart adherent to the cavity 
you stand in for eternity is always hard to stand or not 
still now containing pictures of the faces that still vacate it 
every time the static or revolving back is turned for good 
to make another person who had loved you go astray. 
This is counted on as the multiple of living abstraction 
native to the planet and cutaneous as melanin 
warped to a meniscus on the dollar, in a dreamy waste 
of time to wake up depopulated clutching at genitals 
inflated into concrete fate or pegged to balusters of air 
as the departure of people you love forever proves to be 
perfectible in honest irony and in this is just like 
the void that capital erects in every passing breath it takes 
for granted like a scalpel to ecstasy buried in marrow 
exploding now to cool tomorrow savage in serenity.

Keston Sutherland

Excerpt from ODE TO TL61P 4

The coinage of paedophilia is attributed by the OED to Havelock Ellis, who in his Studies in the psychology of sex (whose first volume begins with a study in the evolution of modesty) classified the sexual love of postpubescent individuals for prepubescent individuals as an "abnormality". We embraced a new ideologeme. Since those first beginnings in what innumerable psychoanalytical thinkers confined to the humanities can now conceptualise as the "pathologization" of too durable infant desire, keeping up childhood for too long, our machinery of classification has been melodiously refined. Besides paedophilia, which now means the sexual love of prepubescent individuals in particular, we now have hebephilia, a diagnosis for the sexual love of individuals in the early stages of puberty, but not earlier; ephebophilia, a diagnosis for the sexual love of individuals lately progressed out of puberty (these last two are sometimes also called korophilia and parthenophilia); teleiophilia, a diagnosis for the sexual love of adult individuals, whom we mirror; and gerontophilia or graeophilia, a diagnosis for the sexual love of elderly individuals. These diagnoses are in turn the subdivisory disorders of chronophilia, a more general term for any limitation of sexual love to individuals living within fixed age limits: chronophilia is in turn a paraphilia, a yet more general term familiarly of biomedical application that describes the misdirection of sexual love as a whole, be it into babies, or non-human objects, or images of suffering, or corpses. It will be obvious that the history of diagnostic refinement in pathologization is at least nominally a case of clinical hellenism; hellenism is itself a word adapted out of its original meaning, which was "the acknowledging and adoring of a multitude of Gods", to fit the less immoderately orgiastic definition "Graecism" in thought or speech. The criminal use of desire would be very grating in Kurdish.

But all sex is barbaric. We are the pleasures we enjoy, the blisses we admire; and all sex is a text, wingbats in a gaping slang. I adopt Hazlitt's position

Keston Sutherland

 

BRACE

What that hill did that fucked you loves you. What this erupted gum rebates will love you very fucking much. Scour in the empty foothold every lift you make vacates on the easy right way up for light rescaled at length to fit the sky you scar for life again, where what cloud prodigal in distanced ice to be sprung upon that tarpaulin to surface in urethane lateral to discrepant now exfoliated canines up to the hill tossed out into that erotic cock did at last for you fucked you loves you, creosote umbilicus, licking for the first time, holding your ends between its teeth, ready to make a bow. Nothing more or less than all that he, she and who else they are unfolds us as for genitals too absolute for health to be that soluble to what death we still are in for comes in any case to level prior life upheld on flights of reactionary sex and fire veined with obsidian and elastic, abdominal origami loved to fuck the best it can, to hold your face in. Exit Mubarak from Tora airlifted in the unique flying hospital at the disposal of the Egyptian revolution that fucks you in and out of love too much, its sore cadaver stuck between your teeth like broken floss. You lie on my lap and [ bend down and lick your eternity shines in the map of my sky. The ultimate eruption in gum is at the same time primary dentition, give or take life. I have spoken so much shit in my life, good and bad, between the cracks of truth it never is, that it is grafted over, where I am put out to live. But without me there nothing could improve. What that two-way open communication will break down as a strategic hurdle present in hierarchical or bureaucratic organizations at the end of it all, it promotes trust in the day-to-day interactions between subordinates and supervisors more united with the mission in their mind, where there is mutual respect among all employees, regardless of official statuses, this is when what employees will not be afraid to do suggests ideas to improve the work processes, benefiting everyone in the return. How else the potential conceded in Freud for total organic erotogenesis down to the last rim or flap of cytoplasm and its limit to life is wiped out, whereas in the logic of asexuality at last almost free to be disgusted at the normal coercion to intercourse and coupling but panromantic holds you. Here are sixteen lost white hairs. What that did that fucks you loves you very much by fucking you and loving fucking you and fucking loving you at once. Nothing but what this may mean will come out of this, bothering not to appear except then. But with millions unemployed, you say it again: what that did that fucks you loves you very much by fucking you and loving fucking you and fucking loving you at once.

Jane Kenyon

Afternoon in the House

It's quiet here. The catssprawl, eachin a favored place.The geranium leans this wayto see if I'm writing about her:head all petals, brownstalks, and those green fans.So you see,I am writing about you.I turn on the radio. Wrong.Let's not have any noisein this room, exceptthe sound of a voice reading a poem.The cats requestThe Meadow Mouse, by Theodore Roethke.The house settles down on its haunchesfor a doze.I know you are with me, plants,and cats—and even so, I'm frightened,sitting in the middle of perfectpossibility.

Erica Hunt

Story of one who forgets she has forgotten

1. The technology of light and shadow8. Basically, something about seeing--caught in the throat,9. No narrative sublime required10. What grief can 1. Color makes us forget the majesty of black,2. Yet that story and others that have been forgotten is carried in3. skin, and the skin is its mirror4. just as a number attracts its equal5. black hats vs white hats almost as simple6. as that, I learned to love wearing her black hat,7. To explain thfit into a book?

Francisco Aragon

 Asleep You Become a Continent

                  (Francisco X. Alarcón)

asleep you become a continent—

undiscovered, mysterious, long,

your legs mountain ranges

encircling valleys, ravines

 

night slips past your eyelids,

your breath the swaying of the sea,

sprawled across the bed like

a dolphin washed ashore, your mouth

 

is the mouth of a sated volcano,

O fragrant timber, how do you burn?

you are so near, and yet so far

 

as you doze like a lily at my side,

I undo myself and invoke the moon—

I’m a dog watching over your sleep

Tim Dlugos

 

Crazy

Everybody tells me I’m crazy because I walked around
muttering and screwed my courses
I’m crazy for losing Financial Aid and living in a
crazy old house full of rifles and books
where I’m crazy in the attic like a Gothic novel and
crazy in bed when I yell in my sleep and of course
because of the other things I do in bed
I’m crazy, but I’ve known that all along and don’t
mind a bit
I’m jobless and crazy, crazy with power, crazy for glamour
and rhinestones and stars,
you’ll laugh at me and point your fingers and I’ll still
be crazy when they lock me up but I’ll be
crazy about the surgical orderly who shaves my head,
that’s the kind of beautiful crazy I’ll be

I’d be crazy to take off my clothes as I read this, and
crazy to take yours off too,
we’d all be crazy about the policemen with big black boots
who’d take us away when we were finally naked
they’d think we were crazy when they read all our personal
records
and saw how I used to be crazy for Jesus, and crazy for real
when I cared that they said I was crazy,
but now I’m 22 and growing my hair, I’m crazy with joy
when I think how I’ll look in a year in the city, out
on the street
being crazy about New York boys, red hair! brown
eyes! blue jeans! who’ll say
You’re crazy when I fall into their eyes.

 

Karen Volkman

The Gold Book

It told the story of a runaway rose
that fled trellises, hedges, and the safety
of the master's shack for a life of abandon
in a town down the mountain, till the repressed
one-armed giantess packed her shears
and went to hunt.  You recall the rest
only in shreds--the long travails of the giantess,
dark windy nights, a loud tavern where soldiers
bounced the blithe rose on their knees 
and called it Betty.  The inevitably violent end.
But what happened to that clarity of detail
you once knew?  The thin book sported toothmarks
and a child's hieroglyphics, pages frayed
and smudged at the edge from too much turning.
You think the vanished facts of the story
must take their place in the continuing
erasures of your life:  forgotten knowledge
and grammars, lost love, sensations and responses,
all heaped democratic in some dank
chaotic attic, with the occasional tantalizing
reminders to bait you, the way you remember,
years later, forgotten dreams at stoplights.
Or how as a child, carried drowsing from the car
by your father, you felt the prickly, solemn
pressure of a father's chest, and for the first time
felt yourself feeling, as if from a distance, and knew 
you were somehow more than what was held.
Now you wonder that all you've forgotten
is already greater than what you contain,
a life conducted under skies
blunt and inexpressive as a giant's wrist.
Songs rise from the tavern to the valley
where vengeance waits, a fate shown
by the simple absence of a rowdy rose,
who at this moment carves initials in a table,
laughing, careless, as you struggle to picture
the specific, lurid end.  Did the giantess
use the shears?  Which arm was missing?

John Wieners

 

David Trinidad's copy

10. Editor Raymond Foye presented me with this copy of John Wieners’s Cultural Affairs in Boston signed by himself, Robert Creeley (who wrote the preface), and Wieners (twice). Within weeks of moving to New York, I found myself sitting across from Wieners at a dinner at an Indian restaurant. We started to converse, but after a few coherent sentences he swerved into some alternate realm. He was certain we’d met years earlier in Canada (where I’d never been), in Toronto, I think. It was confusing to me, but everyone just accepted that that was the way John was. When I read (and fell in love with) his poetry, I understood better. His poems come from a place apart, his own desperately fragile, celebrity-ridden, drug-ravaged reality. Where else but in Wieners can you find lines like “when he put his lips to places I cannot name” or “o letters of fire fall on my head.” His poems make me swoon with identification. They also instruct. “Without image / we are bereft.” “What one knows today will be gone tomorrow. / One reason to write.” Foye, Wieners’s literary executor, has said that a collected Wieners is in the works. This is fabulous news. It’s always heartening when excellent neglected poets emerge from the shadows, fully embodied in their collected works.