Consider it a prompt

Danielle is running a cento contest via the Poets.org Twitter feed, beginning today.

She will be tweeting lines from poems in their database, for you to assemble into a cento.

Details here.

(Jennifer is one of the 35 judges too.)

New review of Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!

An artist tries to find out who he is, why he’s doing what he’s doing, and if it’s worth it. This collection amounts to one big poem, which confronts things that don’t belong in poetry: the anxiety, frustration, disquiet, and uncertainty of this Poet-as-Career business. It questions the value and purpose of an MFA, the role Academia plays in the “poetry market,” and what the life of a poet should consist of. Though the speaker repeatedly begs for his work to be validated and reviewed in a reputable journal, the book offers much more than gloom and desperation. There is a quiet hope arising from the cynicism and sarcasm. The book secretly celebrates the possibility that a poem can interact with and affect the reading public.

--Curtis Purdue in H_NGM_N

Read the rest here.

That sound that you kept hearing

Jennifer L. Knox twittered for Poets.org yesterday and yesternight:

# “Twitter elicits sensations in the brain similar to cocaine and elaborate revenge fantasies.”—Dr. Irene Pepperberg. Next up, Randall Mann. about 11 hours ago via web

# My friend Chenau has the best photo blog ever. On California: http://fauxchenaux.tumblr.com/tagged/cali about 11 hours ago via web

# @Powell_DA Everyday, I pray I'll be sucked up by the cone ray, and then, double bullets. about 11 hours ago via web in reply to Powell_DA

# I have a feeling this is the perfect venue to share an intimate, humiliating secret about myself. And I’m sorta psychic about this stuff so about 11 hours ago via web

# @Powell_DA "Old School"? I'm a Galaga girl mahsef. about 11 hours ago via web in reply to Powell_DA

# If I was the Rhonda in “Help Me, Rhonda" (yeah! get her out of my heart) I’d be, like, “Dude, I can hear you.” http://tinyurl.com/3spnzcl about 12 hours ago via web

# Powell_DA I am never more than 24 hours from Tulsa. about 14 hours ago via txt Retweeted by POETSorg

# Paul_Lisicky Efforts to save & restore the former Ocean City, NJ Lifesaving Station: http://bit.ly/eUgY2t about 14 hours ago via web Retweeted by POETSorg

# It’s Saturday night. Have fun, but if someone catches you in their backyard with rubber gloves on, etc., you’re just plain busted. about 13 hours ago via web

# The Langley School Music Project was a music class project recorded by Canadian elementary school students in 1976 http://tinyurl.com/d2uu97 about 13 hours ago via web

# Japanese animator Kihachiro Kawamoto's lightest work: a self portrait. http://tinyurl.com/3ncnjnr about 14 hours ago via web

# Mom writes, “Put every man in jail who 1) rides a tiny bike and 2) wears pants with 3 stripes down the sides and you’d end world crime.” about 15 hours ago via web

# Boiling chickpeas for dinner, skimming off their translucent coats: a sink full of angel wings. about 16 hours ago via web

# 5:30: Tang and tequila time. about 17 hours ago via web

# “I want to pronounce ‘paradigm’ as ‘pair-a-dig-um’ in, like, a really important interview.”—Noam Chomsky about 18 hours ago via web

# I think Twitter’s actually helping me sustain my focus and concentration. Kidding! Well, onto the next Tweet... about 19 hours ago via web

# If you could get absolutely any one to read your poems aloud, who would you choose? http://tinyurl.com/y93lb8y about 21 hours ago via web

# Apparently nothing's "wrong" and we're all one big happy Tweet clot. This Tweet sponosred by Anxietum™: make every moment totally nuts. about 21 hours ago via web

# Logging in, I somehow wiped out authors' names on older posts. I deleted my identity & tweets but no dice. I'm VERY sorry. How 2 fix? about 22 hours ago via web

We Who Are About to Die reviews Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!

Read it here.

Thanks, Michael Costello & WWAATD.

Also, Danielle has some poems in Tarpaulin Sky

Go visit some selections from her series "The Dead Girls Speak in Unison."

April 4, 2011

PREOCCUPATION

 

1.  position your body in minor places unwelcome to your body.  you may start with places rented or leased to you, or places in which you have a kind of tentative and half-access or right.  10 minutes under your own bed in your rental home or apartment.  then, also, fifty minutes sitting quietly on the strip at the end of the yard, the easement owned by the city and on which the city won’t let you plant rosemary or carrots.  if you have a job, stand in your workplace’s supply closet for seven minutes longer than necessary for whatever task, in the supply closet,  might be done. have a picnic of apples and beer on an island in a parking lot.  sit on the bench outside of olive garden for a morning, reading a romance novel in a navy blue windbreaker.  if you can go to the doctor, do not leave the exam table until three minutes after you have been dismissed.

2. dance music is closer to a true politics. secret ballots and lots of talking and drone attacks are not a true politics, not like dance music. those things are a pre- or post-politics.  the body under dance music is the memory of the body under true politics, is the re-animated and re-vitalized polis. under dance music there is only with the greatest resistance any kind of not moving or not body or almost never a paucity of courage.  and how rare is the lonely dance music?  also how rare the dance music individualist who can remain, over time, against both the crowd and animating beat?  under dance music he forgets, also, remembers, and finally, despite these weights of the present, moves.

3.  "sovereignty is the enemy of freedom."

4. to begin the practice of solidarity, approach, first, the plants, and then the animals, and then the children also the teenagers, and then the elderly, and then the downtrodden who hold signs near the streets despite the heat cold or wind, and then the women (both beautiful and unbeautiful), and the men (both besuited and lacking suits), commenting first upon some shared environmental experience, like rain or the sirens, and remarking upon, second, some  aspect of the other’s undeniable beauty like the softness of their hair or the yellowness of their blossoms or the practical nature of their glittering shoes, and third, after some practice, mention some matter only oblique and suggestive of  justice, or of shared suffering like disease or mortality, or of the world. 

April 3, 2011

no _royal_ road

1.

sue the totality.  sue bosses.  

sue the internet.

sue the avant-garde
    sue prefiguration.
sue debt.  sue men.  sue
the library.  sue fourier.

sue mom.

2.  

Debt punk,
loanstrike,
credit core,
debtor’s prism.

3.

Counterfeit garages.

April 2, 2011

WALT WHITMAN'S POEM TO THINK OF TIME

9:46 AM :  in “to think of time” the awareness of workers' minutes
9:47 AM of time, work, materiality, art
yes Farms, profits, crops, markets, wages, government, are none of them
phantasms,
and even to be able to perceive the unpaid labor of women the pleasure of cities the social nature of work also the nobility of a worker’s death.
the riding crop on the coffin
9:48 AM  and to be born to be identified not diffused that we do not stop at being, but must act to be identified, that even the richest and never working must be "identified"
9:49 AM and distinguished by acts each new birth this possibility

the question "but who are you?" to the infant
all the philosophers who have never thought of this

all  the poets most often unable to see or consider this
the birth of new humans and the minutes and hours of workers!
9:50 AM
"Good day's work, bad day's work, pet stock, mean stock, first out,
last out, turning-in at night, "
9:51 AM
of course no one can see that now. conditions are different.
today a whitman would have to be grotesque
9:59 AM
you are wrong

about whitman now having to be grotesque

or more of one

 do you imagine the material conditions of the 19th century being so much better?
10:00 AM he sat by the beds of young men blown to bits
 their rotting bodies from war
no not at all!
the prostitutes, the workers,  the politics, the slavery, the genocide, grosser, more smelly, less protected devoid of wholesomeness
10:01 AM have you read the accounts of his death?
the records of his bowel movements and urination? as he was shitting and dying
 and also, he imagined in his own reports these diseases, holes, abscesses
 which upon autopsy did not exist, the self imagined pockets of horror
10:04 AM to write at all costs from these ghostly infections

to revise oneself

 as if already dead
that is "inner freedom"
10:14 AM: inner freedom. like what overseers would say to a slave
10:16 AM:
                                   all they want for poetry now

is to be a frayed piece of string 

April 1, 2011

dear shanna,

you can listen to an mp3 of that 37 second recording of Walt Whitman at the same time a lover listens to a re-mixed midi of here comes the sun.    this is the human possibility

full of politics of the ear’s occupation mostly.  Hazel says, as I brush her hair, “you are only allowed to think of an event as a tragedy once you are already dead”

in this America which lasts exactly 37 seconds and is difficult to interpret

these were the best intentions, and also, the voice’s congenial classless intoning, and knowing also that there are around us these specters of the once vastly perceived

and ample: law and love still, willed

to us, this -- my friend -- an anachronistic inheritance, or, ruined broad forethought, or national art / these commons kept in a mattress like a currency of a confederacy never formed.

I will say straight out my morning has been spent vacillating  between the routine of shipwrecked despair and the storm itself  wrecking, undecided about the durability of either.

I walked aboard that ship, itself long ago shattered. things were different.  I once was at sail robust and undiminished, probably a boy

and then most scars and also holidays and every unformed infant impossible, my very form --  a boy’s and sailor’s -- allergic to despair

and how so unplagued by tragedy’s definition I was the one dreaming in each bed into which I fell

and me, Anne Boyer,  falling,  also, in the sunlight, into a reverie against alien architectures and simultaneously into a boyish engineering

of those remnants by which I now, at least, form a substance, imagine an unalien end.