Fanny Howe

 MESSAGE HOME  

I won't be able to write from the grave  

bread,  butter,  so let me tell you what I love:  

oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread,  butter,  

cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace, 

the children nearby, poems and songs,  

a friend sleeping in my bed 

and the short northern nights. 

Eric Elshtain

from100 TANKAS FROM THE VEBLEN

                                                    with Gnoetry, the machine

i.

There was found in force

the barbarian culture. 

But at its own hands

even yet, this tradition— 

This point of ferocity.

ii.

The community,

in vogue, at manual 

work. In its usefulness

it serves all but these structures: 

The development of life.

iii.

What emulation

on the part of workmanship. 

The chief ethnic types

even feel that consumption

is pantomime of status.

100 Tankas From the Veblen was composed with Gnoetry 0.1, using the statistical properties of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). When considering the form for the gnoems, five features of the tanka presented themselves: economy of language; strict predetermined form; serial and syllo- gistic qualities; and stereotypical relationship to a particular moment of insight into and within nature. Given the arguments between the pastoral and the urban within Veblen’s text, and its concerns with economic structures and consumer and cultural production, Japanese tanka seemed a perfect fit.

Tanka is also perfect for agitprop. Turn a tanka into a t-shirt; write one on the stall wall; spray paint one at the aqueduct.

In Gnoetry 0.1, each line the computer generates must be accepted or rejected in its entirety. Though the human author edited for punctuation, the integrity of Gnoetry’s composition was left fully intact after final line choices had been made; words, word order and line order were not changed.

Anthony Thomas Lombardi

 

Lazarus rises from the grave, New York City, 2023

after Nick Cave

               judging by the canary feathers jutting from your mouth
i’d say you’ve come bearing mercy but sometimes
               a cigar is just a cigar. you’ve been feasting on roadkill again.

centuries from Bethany, in a city where only factories close
               quicker than caskets, the lights of New York dissolve before you
like ice on a bruise. you graffiti your grave on every subway map

               in Crown Heights, Astoria, Van Cortlandt Park, always east
of Eden. poor Larry. you never asked to be raised from your tomb.
               you only longed to win the love of longshoremen

swilling lagers & dirty jokes in a bygone Red Hook bar
               to hold the heat & pull of a dying sun. instead you lingered
like a carcass turned cadaver & smudged the air

               with a song no one asked for. stumbling downtown
swallowed by a clash of churls & chants, you recall Jesus & his love
               of lepers as scrawled placards knock your halo

into a surge of traffic. even the angels posted above you snicker
               as they play your spine like a Steinway, biting tongues
that could open a bottle of wine. armed with nothing

               but a psalm, you are reminded of the samurai stripped
of their swords who found their flutes’ bamboo to be the perfect
               cudgel. outside a church, you are drawn to a side door’s

static glow, ghosts rattling their chains & moaning beneath
               the crackle. as a string of sinners, reborn or recently fallen
file out, you recite omens for tomorrow’s blood moon

               like a mockingbird perched on a prophet’s shoulder
but they only throw their day-one chips in your coffee.
               you see no crosses, no scruples & sulking past

the freshly scrubbed window of a storefront, no reflection.
               Heaven is a place where nothing happens & it happens
all day, God often dismissed as rust. like the archer

               surrounded by wolves who reaches into his quiver
& pulls out gladioli, you raise your arms & reach for the stars
               to surrender.

Brenda Hillman

 

Concerning the Meaning Molecule in Poetry

Long ago a man told me, If you write poetry
            keep your subjects small;

i was a tiny skinny girl at that point …

Much later, i heard a meaning molecule
in the call of a dove pretending to be an owl in the pine,

a song-speck circling in a thought throughout all time
            (like the man said, extremely small!)

traveling from before literature
through the blue centuries until quite recently

when a radiant instance of the unknown

           paused our bafflement but kept
that little meaning absolutely elusive, & erotic …

                                    for AC & NS

 

Julia Bloch

 

APOLOGY TO LOS ANGELES

I’m sorry because winter.
I’m sorry because “Lost Angeles.”
I’m sorry because the hand is the
most versatile of instruments and even zero
is a position. I’m sorry for the
poem, I’m sorry for the email, I’m sorry
for the subject line in the email, I’m sorry
about that line about the email in the poem.
The window was open and a hard
piece of metal flew in from the street, I think
that must have been what happened, it was
just the dirty structure of everything.
In the mornings the peacocks at Hollywood
Forever walked around and around
in caged circles and I was the cat, I was the housecat.

Owen Dodson

 SORROW IS THE ONLY FAITHFUL ONE

Sorrow is the only faithful one:
The lone companion clinging like a season
To its original skin no matter what the variations.

If all the mountains paraded
Eating the valleys as they went
And the sun were a coiffure on the highest peak,

Sorrow would be there between
The sparkling and the giant laughter
Of the enemy when the clouds come down to swim.

But I am less, unmagic, black,
Sorrow clings to me more than to doomsday mountains
Or erosion scars on a palisade.

Sorrow has a song like a leech
Crying because the sand’s blood is dry
And the stars reflected in the lake

Are water for all their twinkling
And bloodless for all their charm.
I have blood, and a song.

Sorrow is the only faithful one.