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Lake Sketch #13

The girl with no belief

system ties knots

 into a rope

while listening

to U2 on

her headphones.

What?  Well, not

everyone in a poem

can have good taste.

Nostradamus says “Bring to

my table the flesh

of this lake’s

Finest poet!”  “But,

Nostradamus, she left town

yesterday with a sign

taped to her

chest that said

give blood, get a

chance to win a

free iPad2 or Kindle

Touch."

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Lake Sketch 12

How strange to be seven months pregnant and see

the man you used to have sex with

so glossy, confused and embalmed on the pages of SPIN

magazine at a Barnes and Noble

in Tallahassee, Fl, his torso no

bigger than the length of the metacarpal

of your third finger.  I suppose I could

get back on Facebook and try to friend

him and say “hey”  but my interest is too shallow

 like the grave of a cat or a hamster. 

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Lake Sketch #11

Beautiful, lovely, full women live in New England.

Beautiful, lovely, full women live in Massachusetts.

They are always really happy writing surreal poems even when they’re doing porn etc.

They eat corn mostly and have long hair etc.

When other women tell the beautiful, lovely, full women of New England

To cut their hair, the beautiful, lovely, full women

know it’s a trap! They’ve read Darwin.

They have gone to the depths of the lake and pulled out their

Consciousness.  Sampson! How odd! They put their breasts on backwards

And call themselves “spiritual.”

Lake Sketch 10

I fake the lake I skin

 the fake I mistake

the lake I lament

the skin the

lake I trim

 the lament I make,

 tackle the gilt

cage I cage

the Age of H-

2-O, liquid eyeliner. 

The Lake (Edgar Allan Poe)

In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less-
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody-
Then-ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight-
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define-
Nor Love-although the Love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining-
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

The bee's got a little buzz...

So when we announced our 2012-2013 list,* we hinted that we'd be doing a few other things too.

And this is one of those things.

We will be instituting an Open Reading Period for Poetry Chapbooks.

Soon.

No fee. No bullshit.

Details to come once NaPoWriMo is over. But you can start thinking about it now, if you're that sort of thinker.

We also have 2014 forming a beautiful nebula of awesome in our minds.

So basically, we're just teasing you right now? Nah, we're just so excited we had to tell someone.




*Note that things have changed a bit since then. For instance, Shanna's book is now two books Brink (2012) and The Seam (2013). The chapbook(s) we choose from the open reading period will be published in Fall 2012 and/or Spring 2013. TINA by Peter Davis & Natural History Rape Museum by Danielle Pafunda are still both on track for 2013.

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Sandra's new book...

...from our friends at Cleveland State University Poetry Center is now available!

"You Can't Build a Child" from Poetry Magazine
"Used White Wife" & "DNA Woven from Lasers in the Jungle" from Spooky Boyfriend
"Strays: A Love Story" from HTMLGiant

Just funnin'

If you somehow missed Jennifer L. Knox guest-blogging at The Best American Poetry last week, you missed a great series of interviews on the topic of humor in poetry:

• Intro: Send in the Crying on the Inside Kind of Clowns
• Funny Woman #1: Amy Lawless
• Funny Woman #2: Melissa Broder
• Funny Woman #3: Sharon Mesmer
• Funny Woman #4: Sommer Browning
• Funny Woman #5: Rachel Shukert
• & then a talk with Kazim Ali (who disapproves of funny poetry...or does he?)

Lake Poem #9

The soul like a roach

sequestered under a water glass.

Sam wrote today and said remember when we had

dinner in SF with your friendly, stoner boyfriend?

I had a friendly boyfriend? I have no mentor

and I mentor no one.

Rain like scientific notation on the surface

of the lake. A duckling ate a full-grown,

blue heron. The grassy kingdom celebrates

the unlikely king by clinking wine glasses.

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Lake Poem 8

Oh gigantic woman of the swept-away!

On my doorstep this morning I found a red feather from your headdress,

the one made from a thousand caterpillar eyes, the one made with the spleens

of a million snow geese.

In your body of waterwheels,

in your of scales and skins of figure eights, there were infinite clocks!

In your ten-thousand minnow fingers and toes carved from the tongue of turtles,

the humongous orgasm-based human origin of falling stomach-pits

mixed counter-clockwise debris suns

with the moldy decibels of half-eaten hotdog buns.

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Lake Poem #7

Maud is gone. So Modernism.

So Yeats, Laertes, skull, origin. Hulk Hogan?

Make no mistake, the lake mocks

your own clay grin. A dandelion?

In the coffee shop one sorority girl compliments

the whiteness of the other’s teeth.

Psalm gone. Problem solved. So Gaga from her

egg of triumph.

Someone now driving off with the paper coffee cup

on the roof of his car.

from The Book of Scab

On day 8, Scab writes:

Dear Mom and Dad,  

Indicate to me that it’s acceptable to feel this way forever... 

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Lake Sketch #6

(Easter Poem for My Christian Friends)

The song of the lake and the song of the human

make

the electric chair.

The hand and the syringe  

make

the bread-maker.

The wheat flour and sticker-book

make

the bed.

The house and the tornado

make

the frogs.

The song and the walk

make

the crucifix.

Lake Sketch #5

For William Carlos Williams

Today Rick Scott fired all the scientists at water management.

So much for documentary poetics. The ure ducts of erica o azy.

Mom said these politicians just ruin people’s lives

and at dinner Emily asked “where are all the journalists?”

The lake is the center of some great wheel of sheer rags.

The centrifugal force pulls the molecules even when they don’t want to go anywhere.

The scientist packs up the things that have accumulated in her office.

Coffee cups, data, cardboard box. I break on the

and don’t really regret it, want to name this pull— but how?

Much more difficult than naming an unborn baby. 

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Lake Sketch #4

For Brian Ang

What will impress the death cult? The beautiful, vacant

death cult? What will impress the mirror-writing lump,

water’s canto, her cinema,

commerce’s atomic center?

What will impress the cult of death?

The cult of holes, of clothes. The cult of sharp elbows.

The empress of the lake is here, all 90 degree angles.

Hello empress of the lake. She answers through her teeth of zeros, in geese.

 To move five stones to the right is to enforce the

odds. To pepper-spray a toddler in the springtime,  Printemps Paris.

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Lake Sketch #3

Last night read a poetry book full of pseudo-philosophic musings. Life enemies, is boring!
Some sort of giantess shot out of the lake with a yellow feather attached to her big toe.




Made me want to drink and listen to country music even though I'm pregnant. Doc says son you can’t do any more of that cocaine. Have I become this southern and trashy? Can the paw of a tulip grow from the mouth of a dead dog?




Little shepherd boy of the valley, oh little Christian checkout boy, oh little green apron boy with the crappy gray eyes, lets watch the sun rise over Georgia.




Gave poetry book five stars on Goodreads. I am such a liar!
What if I get pregnant or step on a syringe and contract AIDS?  Who’s going to give me a lot of money



so I can quit my day job and joke around? A log truck rolled over on my commute and out spilled a lake who was trying to communicate by dragging his circular pilgrims underwater.

*The Book of Scab*

Scab can't help herself. She writes:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I try to leave, but I only make it as far as the gutter...

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How's your day 3?

Good morning, Friends of Bloof.

Yesterday, the Poetry Foundation shared one of Sandra's poems from the April issue of Poetry: "You Can't Build a Child"

Jennifer continues her interview series with funny women at The Best American Poetry. Yesterday was Amy Lawless. Today is Melissa Broder. She's also highlighting some of her favorite poems from NaPoWriMo.net-listed sites each day!

Let's make it three for three, ladies--shall we?

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Lake Sketch Two

Why do you keep asking about the Indian burial ground of my childhood? Growing collards is easy: you toss some seeds into the dirt and… voilà!

This life that I hate more than anything. “Here Pepito, have a 40.”

This apartment that I despise more than life. “Here Mark Strand, have a 40.”

The founder of a large corporation wished to buy me a plate of spaghetti. This lake: just the rambling-on of an idiot.

No one word contains inherent magic, Child Lake! Let me reiterate: You have my friendship, but how will you take my word?

2

Hey! I have a sard-red tatter...

Lake Sketch #1

Twin girls throw balls of bread at the blue heron standing in the lake.

One woman wears a shirt that says “Property of Jesus,” another wears a shirt that says “Je t’adore.”

Pink hamburger slime. Ammonia on the heaven sent, on where we went. Disinfectant. Move six stones

to the left. War trope, Vietnam-era helicopter, heliotrope. This is my token of friendship.

By the end of this poem, the heron will fall over on his side and die.

What'll we make this year?

In the brain there’s a mutilating wire...

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The Bloofiest Month: Yeah, We Celebrate NaPoWriMo

There's nothing official about NaPoWriMo, and that's the way we like it. It's not invented, supported, or sponsored by any organization. Anyone can participate. (Sign up here, or don't sign up--it doesn't matter!)

You can read about NaPoWriMo at Wikipedia.

So, here on the Bloof blog, some of us will be writing a new poem every day, for 30 days. Or giving it our best shot, anyway.

While we are warming up and stretching, here's some recent Bloof news:

• Here's an interview about art & mustaches with Peter Davis at HTMLGiant
• Peter's also got some stuff in the new issue of Stoked
• Sandra Simonds has 14 sonnets in the new issue of Court Green
• Another one of Sandra's sonnets from that issue was on Verse Daily last week
• Danielle Pafunda has new work in Spittoon & Kenyon Review too
• Shanna Compton also has work in Court Green & Eleven Eleven
• Sandra & Jennifer L. Knox both have work in Sprung Formal
• & Jennifer is guest blogging at The Best American Poetry every day this week!