Word For/Word: Previews and Announcements

Word For/Word #19

2011-11-23T14:18:00.000-08:00

Issue 19 of Word For/Word is long overdue, but it is under construction and will be worth the wait, as it will feature new poems by Annah Browning, Kathleen Rooney, Cindy St. John, Joshua Kryah, Shira Dentz, Kristina Marie Darling, Kevin O'Rourke, William Cordeiro,Derek Henderson, Brad Vogler, Lynn Strongin, Gautam Verma Emileigh Barnes, Tim Shaner, Jeff Harrison, Dorothee Lang, Moriah L Purdy, Rachel May, Brian Strang,, Crystal Gibbins, Brian Lucas, and Mike Sikkema, plus reviews of new books by Arianne Zwartjes, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Charles Bernstein, and Kent Johnson.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of issue 20.

A LONG-ABANDONED BREATH, by Wes Bensen

A long-abandoned breath
heard between apologies
unmaps the world.

I switch on the kitchen light.
Appliances emerge
as if by choice.

With regard to supplication
I’m dead to difficulty.
Am I what I think I am.

Am I error’s dancehall:
low-ceilinged,
refrigerator-growled.

Invocation, Annah Browning (forthcoming in issue 19)

2011-08-22T10:03:00.000-07:00

***

The antlers are massive.
They are sitting outside

in the rain. I am outside, too.
I put my head down

next to them. Be, be,
I say. Be, be.

---

Nothing attaches. Nothing
is strong enough.

Then, if we are clever.
Then, if we are wily.

The whole house falls down
clear of itself.

To be destroyed. To be free
of the Maker.

from Ark Codex 0 (forthcoming in issue 19)

2011-08-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

Vilnius, by William Cordeiro (forthcoming in issue 19)

2011-08-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

Another dusk slips its guillotine. Mummy-shriveled, I have lost
myself down narrow, cobblestone streets in the Jewish quarter
that wend as corkscrewily as crotch-hairs; cloud-sludged sky-
lights perma-grey within defunct Soviet apartment complexes.

Expect continued snowfall. Prepare for fresh-cleaned, starched
infirmary sheets. A star-needle skips on the soft tissue of a voice
box. Tourists traipse through guessing games; guilt trip on gelt
in a city of pinchbeck disco and swirly-doo onion domes, a Frank

Zappa statue, and a basketball team best remembered for their tie-
dyed warm-ups. Chug Pixy Stix and stagger back to hail a gypsy
cab. Drop a dimebag in a busker’s hurdy-gurdy case. Professional
mourners resume protocol. But nobody offers them the time of day.

This is a dry run. Or has the gentle reader turned to leave the room?

Horizon Story, by Brian Lucas (forthcoming in issue 19)

2011-07-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Summer Vacation, by Cindy St. John (forthcoming in issue 19)

2011-07-04T09:55:00.000-07:00

To speak/swallow highways you take to
horizontal your fist on the horizon squint one eye

To sink/eat/starve 500 miles in a car you don’t own
with lips that are not your own and a language you have only half-
memorized to get here

To crack/break under the sound of wind
of box fans like no sound or white light or distance

To strum/tap the glass remember the body
sweat in the sheet of stars soundless

To stomp/tip toe over faces/names/tequila bottles

To swim/wade/dive your field of vision infinitely
multiplying the weight of your arms you lived/ died

Break the glass

To fade/disappear into the landscape isn’t that
what you wanted?

Skelebug, by Brian Strang (forthcoming in issue 19)

2011-06-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

Heaving, the Air (I), by Kevin O'Rourke (forthcoming in issue 19)

2011-06-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

Struck, on its side, I imagine an image of the deer laying, its breath coming sharp & hot and making a cerise mist of the air: when your mother saw the deer, as her car passed, slowly, she burst suddenly into tears.

*

I fall forward and catch myself on my hands; the snow works its way wetly through the holes in my gloves. I know this chill by the cold wet working its way through the holes in my gloves, and am thankful for the reminder so thank

*

you standing as a statue of you, classical, your dress’s shoulder straps sliding down your shoulders, the deer’s very red blood on the dark snow on the side of the road’s shoulder there, there’s so much ice, many spinning tires, yarns:

*

as it was only told to me as such I can too be present, my handkerchief at the ready, these inches of ice below my feet someone’s small fire flickering off in the distance which reminds me to, to, tragedies happen, fear happens, but also living too, too,

Robinson Escapes to the Cape for Independence Day, by Kathleen Rooney (forthcoming in issue 19)

2011-06-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

O little-known facts—how Robinson attracts them!

Pilgrims rocked ashore here, before Plymouth Rock.

The word scrimshaw is of unknown origin.

The stock name of the archaic two-lane main road? Route 6A. Really it’s Old King’s Highway.

Some facts are useless: the paper bag was invented in Dennis.

Some facts are not: Wellfleet’s town clock sings out ship’s time.

19th century Americans observed only three holidays. The Fourth of July was one.

O witty aperçus—how Robinson accrues them!

Good food is self-made, like a good millionaire.

Don’t just do something. Stand there.

It’s got to be the weekend somewhere.

Robinson is crisp & perspicuous. His wife stands next to him on the sand.

Democracy could be a lot more sexy if…this one fades in the rockets’ red glare.

Ann blushes, runs a hand through his hair.

Robinson looks up, concussed.

Fireworks percuss.

Meditation on Anxiety, by Crystal S. Gibbins (forthcoming in issue 19)

2011-05-30T09:46:00.000-07:00

Helen, by Jeff Harrison (forthcoming in issue 19)

2011-05-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home, remembering past ills and past enchantments, the enchantments of all Greece, the languors of old Rome. The agate lamp within thy hand. The lustre as of olives where she stands. How statue-like I see thee stand, remembering past enchantments and past ills.

The agate lamp within thy hand. The still eyes in the white face. The lustre as of olives where she stands. The folded scroll within thy hand. Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face: white ash amid funereal cypresses. The enchantments of all Greece, the languors of old Rome. How statue-like I see thee stand. The still eyes in the white face remembering past enchantments and past ills. Greece sees, unmoved, the agate lamp within thy hand. Thy Naiad airs have brought me home. The lustre as of olives where she stands. White ash amid funereal cypresses.

Katherine Hastings – Review of Of Indigo and Saffron — New and Selected Poems by Michael McClure

2011-02-28T13:56:00.000-08:00

Of Indigo and Saffron — New and Selected Poems
by Michael McClure, edited and with an introduction by Leslie Scalapino (University of California Press ,2011)

"This is countless times/BETTER/than being rich/and it has sweet breath." — from "Plum Stone Two", Michael McClure

Forget the Six Gallery reading when a young Michael McClure read on the same night Ginsberg read Howl. Or at least forget it for a while. Instead, find out when Michael McClure will be reading in your area from his latest book, Of Indigo and Saffron — New and Selected Poems and then go. You won't be sorry. He has made several appearances in the Bay Area recently. I was fortunate enough to see him at Moe's in Berkeley and the poetry section on my shelves is richer for having placed Of Indigo and Saffron next to Star; Huge Dreams; Mysteriosos and other works by McClure.

Leslie Scalapino, the magnificently unusual and interesting L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet who died in May last year, was a very good friend of McClure's. In this way, Of Indigo and Saffron is a double-gift; it contains an inspired collection of McClure's poems chosen by someone close to him, and an introduction that reveals a deep understanding of McClure's poetic history, awakenings, intentions and "intellectivity," a word coined by McClure. Some poems are expected: "For the Death of 100 Whales," "Peyote Poem," "Hummingbird Ode," and others that will be familiar to anyone who has followed McClure's career. Others are more surprising (at least to me), and delightfully so. "To Glean the Livingness of Worlds" ("2. MY EYES WERE NOT TURNED BACK/UPON THEMSELVES/but went reaching out through all the wolves and elves/that slept beneath my bed and in the corners of my head…"; "Cold Saturday Mad Sonnet" (Oh perfect chill slot of space!/WALL STREET, WALL STREET…"); "The Cheetah" ("What is human/is so much more obvious/in beings with tails.")

Placed at the end of the book is McClure's new poem sequence, Swirls in Asphalt. As Scalapino points out, "each particle (or poem in the sequence) is an instant…and all parts are the same instant…The only light struggle as such is physical — awareness — an almost effortless act of reading in which the attention of the reader is held throughout." The series begins with a quote by Dogen Zenji: "The limits of the knowable are unknowable" — an appropriate opening for poems that do nothing if not continually open, and then open some more. These newer poems affirm that McClure is still a tremendous poetic force in message and magic and style. "THE FOREST OF HORSES/is a floating/island/in the eye..." (#20).

A famous poet told me not long ago that the poets to pay attention to today are the young poets; they're what's "happening". Without turning my back on that young talent, I say don't turn your back on McClure, either. He is no longer young. But the young, and everyone else, would be hard pressed to read a more relevant, original and "happening" contemporary poet, a poet who continues to add to the best of California's rich poetic history.

SMALL

POEM

is a soul

like an opal

(from "grafting five")

If this is true, Of Indigo and Saffron is a soul like the Great Star of Africa.

Editor's Notes (forthcoming in issue 18)

2011-02-13T16:18:00.001-08:00

In These Arms Riots Love, by Sean Burn (forthcoming in issue 18)

2011-01-29T11:35:00.000-08:00

AWP Off-Site Poetry Reading

2011-01-24T17:58:00.000-08:00

Free Verse/Editions, Reconfigurations, and Word For/Word

Wednesday, February 2, 6-8 PM,
Busboys and Poets (5th and K)

1025 5th Street, NW, Washington, DC.
http://www.busboysandpoets.com/

Readings by:

James Capozzi, Geoffrey Gatza, Adam Golaski, Matthew Klane, Adam Liszkiewicz, Marjorie Maddox, Brittany Perham, Sarah Sarai, Jon Thompson, Daniel Tiffany, Sam Truitt, and Bryan Walpert

***

From:

Word For/Word,
http://www.wordforword.info/vol17/index.htm,

Free Verse/Editions,
http://www.jon-thompson.net/free-verse-editions.html, and
Reconfigurations,
http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/

****

This event is free. We hope to see you there.

W. Scott Howard, editor & publisher, Reconfigurations

Jonathan Minton, editor & publisher, Word For/Word

Jon Thompson, editor & publisher, Free Verse/Editions

*****

James Capozzi lives in Binghamton, NY. His poetry has been published widely, including journals and magazines such as BOMB, New Republic, Denver Quarterly and Chicago Review. His book, Country Album, won the New Measure Poetry Prize and will be published by Free Verse Editions in 2011.

Geoffrey Gatza is the editor and Publisher of BlazeVOX [books] and the author of eight books of poetry; Secrets of my Prison House will be out in the Fall of 2010. Kenmore: Poem Unlimited and Not So Fast Robespierre are now available from Menendez Publishing. HouseCat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children is also available from Meritage Press. He lives in Buffalo, NY with his girlfriend and two cats. http://www.geoffreygatza.com/ & http://www.blazevox.org

Adam Golaski is the author of the collections of short stories, Worse than Myself (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2008) and Color Plates (Rose Metal Press, 2010). He is the co-founder and co-editor of Flim Forum Press and writes at the blog Little Stories.

Matthew Klane is co-editor/founder of Flim Forum Press. He is the author of the book B_____ Meditations from Stockport Flats Press (2008). His latest chapbooks include Friend Delighting the Eloquent, Sorrow Songs, and The- Associated Press. He currently lives and writes in Albany, NY.

A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz lives in Buffalo, NY, where he is an MFA student in Media Arts Production at the University at Buffalo. He is the Assistant Editor of Digital, Visual and Sound Poetry at the journal, Anti-.

Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (WordTech Editions); Weeknights at the Cathedral (Yellowglen Prize); When the Wood Clacks Out Your Name: Baseball Poems (Redgreene Press); six chapbooks, and over 350 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies. She is the co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press, 2005) and author of two children’s books from Boyds Mills Press. Her short story collection, What She Was Saying, was one of three finalists for the Katherine Anne Porter Book Award, and a semifinalist for Leapfrog Press’s book contest and Eastern Washington University’s Spokane Fiction Book Award. The recipient of numerous awards, she gives readings and school visits across the country. For more info and reviews, please see http://www.lhup.edu/mmaddoxh/biography.htm

Brittany Perham is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her first collection of poems, The Curiosities, will be published in 2011 by Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. She holds degrees from Tufts University and from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, and she has twice been a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. She has taught Poetry Writing and American Literature at James Madison University and at the University of Virginia.

Of Sarah Sarai's collection, The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX), Gerald Schwartz wrote, "the confrontation and interactions with an emotional life gives the author's poems a nervy, discomfiting vitality. Their very rawness and urgency bring these poems to a kind of transcendence." Poems in Threepenny Review, Parthenon West, Mississippi Review, and others; a chapbook soon from Loose Gravel Press. She lives in her New York and dreams of her California.

Jon Thompson teaches at North Carolina State University where he edits Free Verse; A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and the single author poetry series, Free Verse Editions. His first book of poems was The Book of the Floating World; his most recent book is a collection of lyrical essays, After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing (Shearsman Books, 2009).

Daniel Tiffany is the author of three books of poetry: Puppet Wardrobe (Parlor Press); The Dandelion Clock (Tinfish Press); and Privado (Action Books). His critical books include Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric and Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance. In addition, he has translated works by Georges Bataille, Sophocles, and the Italian poet, Cesare Pavese. He teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Sam Truitt is the author of numerous books in the Vertical Elegies series, including The Song of Rasputin, Falltime, Raton Rex, The Section, Anamorphosis Eisenhower, and the forthcoming Street Mete. He lives in Woodstock, NY where he edits Station Hill Press.

Bryan Walpert is the author of a collection of poetry, Etymology, and collection of short stories, Ephraim's Eyes. He holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and Ph.D. from the University of Denver. His work has appeared widely in journals, such as AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden's Ferry Review and Tar River Poetry. A recipient of the James Wright Poetry Award from the Mid-American Review, he teaches creative writing at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

from Concrete, by Andrew Topel (forthcoming in issue 18)

2011-01-22T11:34:00.000-08:00

AWP Poetry Reading Lineup

2011-01-17T12:52:00.000-08:00

Word For/Word will co-host an off-site AWP reading with the journals Free Verse and Reconfigurations in Washington, DC on Wednesday, February 2 from 6-8 PM at Busboys and Poets (5th and K) during the 2011 AWP Conference. The event is free.

From Reconfigurations: Bryan Walpert, Marjorie Maddox, and Geoffrey Gatza.

From Free Verse: Daniel Tiffany, Jon Thompson, and Brittany Perham and James Capozzi.

From Word For/Word: Adam Golaski, Matthew Klane, Adam Liszkiewicz, and Sam Truitt

Busboys and Poets is located on the corner of 5th and K at 1025 5th Street, NW, Washington, DC: http://www.busboysandpoets.com/about_5th.php

Two important announcements

2011-01-17T08:41:00.000-08:00

1. Issue 5 of Dear Sir is now available. The new issue focuses on translation: www.dearsir.org

2. Ecolinguistics is accepting submissions for issue 2. Issue 1 shipped to Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, Italy, Uganda, and throughout the United States. It featured work by John Bloomberg-Rissman, Steve Dalachinsky, Patrick James Dunagan, Whit Griffin, W. Scott Howard, Mary Kasimor, Michael Leong, E. J. McAdams, Deborah Meadows, Jonathan Minton, Richard Owens, Nate Pritts, Chuck Richardson, Andrew Schelling, Brandon Shimoda, and Tyrone Williams. Subscriptions to Ecolinguistics are free: http://eccolinguistics.blogspot.com/

from The Schizophrenia Sketches, by Anhvu Buchanan (forthcoming in issue 18)

2011-01-15T11:33:00.000-08:00

IV.

how many films were made from broken recipes/it’s time to cook the cake mix with the broccoli/there is a safety in mismatched clothing that else no one knows/i’ve collected all the spare scraps from the local museum/follow the ribbons as far as the morning can go/why must the insects persecute me/i want to eat ice water the way angels do/if i can read a magazine to the air is there anyone there to hear it crash/there’s no better time like robot time/what does it mean to look through a telescope/i have turned my mother parts inside out/why call it shambles when i can call it treasure/i have fallen and there is no piano to pick me up

Riparian Ephemera in October for Spring, by Gracie Leavitt (forthcoming in issue 18)

2011-01-08T11:33:00.000-08:00

I. A rush of ink in the tall grasses—his heft of marginalia in my hands.

II. His hand in her hair on his knee by the bed; her hands in the grass later on—how quick the soup came off.

III. She was a honey with a hand with a balloon on a string on a day when milt mixed with her roe in the weed, vanishing.

IV. Never to have picked apart the rock, to have sunk the thumb in marrow deep—in alb, in milky mud—as she rowed by.

V. At first blush the fetid crab apples were his in my hands—later those crushed upon the walk, later these held up to our radiator as it bled.

Word For/Word will be at AWP in February

2011-01-02T10:03:00.000-08:00

Word For/Word will co-host an off-site AWP reading with the journals Free Verse and Reconfigurations in Washington, DC on

Wednesday, February 2 from 6-8 PM
at Busboys and Poets (5th and K).

The event is free and open to the public.

Readers will include:

Matthew Klane,
Aaron McColough,
Adam Golaski,
A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz,

plus writers from Free Verse and Reconfigurations.

Busboys and Poets is located on the corner of 5th and K at 1025 5th Street, NW, Washington, DC.

from Sidestepping grace, by Ian Seed (forthcoming in issue 18)

2011-01-01T11:32:00.001-08:00

1

the documentary skin
spells steep slopes

and other bells
treated as equals

girls
impossible to meet

or kiss in the stairwell
with the notion

of rain hammering the roof
bubbling fat

until midnight
with the light turned off

2

now my estranged
barber

may spot a bald patch soon
blooming in motion

mine is pretty small
in the morning

recentralising
‘angels’

no I never saw one
without the inverted commas

which is all she’s wearing
her mouth open

from Sidestepping grace, by Ian Seed (forthcoming in issue 18)

2011-01-01T11:32:00.000-08:00

from The Fragilist, by Jim Berger (forthcoming in issue 18)

2010-12-25T11:32:00.000-08:00

16.

Poor cell, poor cell, pregnant again
with division, its over-completion
is its fragility, a hyphenation
that never knew what split it.
He’s tormented by that fantasy–
of sponginess, the possibility of that rip
right down the nucleus,
reciprocal
incontinence
of incarnation,
in each moment of labor
the mutating code re-engaled
like a sneeze.
He fears, rather, that he is porcelain,
poured to a shape,
unable to blink;
the same baked function.

17.

The fragilist sees a tunnel in a pool of dark
and small half-worlds, durable, drifting,
illuminated from a source in haze
beneath what must be a horizon
yet somewhat closer than where he’d guessed;
A horizon for every occasion, he surmises.
There is a sense of “presentation,”
as if “pecan encrusted on a bend of lentils
and a banana leaf,” or at least that impression
bundles itself, as with secret muscles
which then dissolve, as if
abandoned by his spine.

There is a cake in the VCR, by Kara Imre (forthcoming in issue 18)

2010-12-18T11:32:00.000-08:00

There is a cake in the VCR instead of not. I am in trouble cause I baked a TV who’s having a baby. The baby is stuck and now the guests are pissed. I am a by-stander, did not use antennas. Recipe called for motion, only. Action, movie. The TV needs a C-section. Cut. Driving to the mall. Riding escalators like they’ll take me to dinosaurs. It’s called the land before mine. I am out of AA batteries. The cashier is bitchy, wears a bun of hair. I am running under fluorescent lights next to toy stores. There is a boy over my shoulder selling puzzles. Take two. Remote in tact. The cake is wound up. She ejects eventually. I put on my party hat and everyone gives me their plate. I hang the piñata and everyone goes on hitting.

Announcement - Country Music: An Online Journal of Poetry

2010-12-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

The first issue of Country Music: An Online Journal of Poetry is available at

http://countrymusicpoetry.org/

with Poems by

Clay Matthews
Lucy Biederman
Matt Hart
Samuel Day Wharton
Peter Davis
Amber Nelson
Jim Goar
Jackie Clark

plus a special feature, The Country Music Love and Loss Collective, by

Adrian Kien
Karena Youtz
Scott Abels
J. Reuben Appelman

and Tyler McMahon's correspondence with Denis Johnson.

Shimmer Your New ‘Do, by Kate Dougherty (forthcoming in issue 18)

2010-12-04T11:25:00.000-08:00

1

Robot—
says the polka dot girl at night,
says the polka dot girl at morning
when her window’s glazed…
It’s winter and her glass to outside is whitish glow…
a cloud of snow—
so under her blanket she’ll slide hide go!
In bed—alone,
no diary under pillow whispers,
metal,
circle joints, glowing sockets…
I will watch you fit your frame
and treat your toes like gold…
New shoes,
red with white dots,
and she tucks them inside sheets—
asks the thing for its opinion,
tells the thing the places they’ll go,
where the sun’s rays turn red to pink,
where red clay makes the edges orange,
she’ll sit, chin on knees,
the nook in between
and wouldn’t you like to go?

Her eyelids lower—
and fingernail finds its lights-off switch
the tops of new shoes wriggle,
the toes,
jolting with sleep inside—
running a path to each his own…

2

In spring
nothing left has to die!
In morning
nothing left needs to shift and shake!
In the bedroom,
the echo takes its hold in the corners
mimes
the tree leaves
left
hanging…

3

Robot—
says the polka dot girl at night,
says the polka dot girl at morning
when her window’s glazed…
No digital minutes
wait for her to rise.
No leaves on branch
will whisper her their song.
With it, she wonders,
how her new shoes will fare—
once the red clay thaws to spread?
Tighter,
they figure with the laces,
they pull the sheets under the chin…
She rests it on her fish-bone hand
(on her heel, the strongest).
And it remains,
corners and joints.
It’s between her
arm and ribs…

Her eyelids lower—
and fingernail finds its lights-off switch
jolting with sleep inside—

Word For/Word is now socially networked

2010-11-28T08:58:00.000-08:00

Word For/Word has a new Facebook page.

Cognition, by Rebecca Eddy (forthcoming in issue 18)

2010-11-27T11:21:00.000-08:00

"a tie," by Bruno Neiva (forthcoming in issue 18)

2010-11-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

Word For/Word will be at AWP in February

2010-11-18T13:56:00.000-08:00

Word For/Word will co-host a reading with Free Verse and Reconfigurations in Washington, DC on Wednesday, February 2 from 6-8 PM at Busboys and Poets (5th and K) during the 2011 AWP Conference. The event is free. More details will be posted here. If you happen to be in DC or attending the 2011 AWP conference, then come on by and say hello!

from "Shadow Boxes", by Lily Ladewig (forthcoming in issue 18)

2010-11-13T11:18:00.000-08:00

Let’s build a fire. A shifting location. A change of wind and I can smell myself. Like something foreign. And into the fuller fascination. I can see the Chrysler Building from the window of the subway car on the bridge. I would measure the distance between us footwise. I would pull this epic from you with my whole body. Beneath your bright palms my breasts might become a reality. While my hands, full of acreage. Are budding outside your open. Third story window. The dancers push their painted feet across the page.

*

I don’t remember you putting even one finger inside. Me: these burn blotches, the dresses I wore. An example of the body. The body wants what the body. Wants. Is it so emblazoned? Is it possible to be in a garden and not be in Italy? Each night we managed to consume. Two lobsters each. Apple pie à la mode. We embellished the margins with the city. To wake up every morning forgetful. City of fedoras. You might say it was trusting but you would veer wrong. Somewhere, the city of. The shaking of the bedbones. All I want now are your birds. All of them.

*

Have you ever seen a pecan grove? That was the one time I’ve been arrested in my life. The wet grass like drunkards. A fleur de lys of feeling. It was pressed. I was kicking. The comforter. They called the cops. I’ve been haunting you for hours now. The trick is to not get too gnarled up about it. Imagine rendering chicken fat. Turning to you then away. The overturning of your turning. The tailored shirt, for example. It can be worn tight on the body, or totally oversized, with tights and a pair of tall heels. I could say what you’re expecting. I could be a blond. I could keep going.

ECCOLINGUISTICS: CALL FOR WORK / WRITINGS, VISUAL

2010-11-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

from http://eccolinguistics.blogspot.com/

ECCOLINGUISTICS exists to give to Mars what happened. It must consider itself a/n historical log. Otherwise the mere sic art of the ear. It seeks one thing—hoary labor in "Elegy / Churchyard" (impersonal pastorals, Wordsworth's bone-headed "language used by real men"), D’s unwritten frame in frequent, drafty headaches, and too many Ds—"he had the longest day compeusing in the orchard"—Howe's thickets of Kim's colonizing "english" like Iijima's dirt shake or Doller's "full jar of heroines," rambunctious as hell seems Schelling's and Richardson's neon mud-caked coyote skin, a bug through the stream of some mountain town, mined shaft Halpern's future perfect tense toward Williams in a Detroit apartment (forthcoming?) what does it matter—Chirot's scratched site—"the most extreme consciousness of doom" ASS Adorno's "idle chatter"—to locate and record and perhaps create the end of whose planet changes where ECCOLINGUISTICS meant catalyst, complexity's angled, sparks, industrial semiosis a generation'd echo, as if the one new void generations of stalled time, unto blooming Techne

in bloated old samizdat style, in reproduction, its meteoric paradigm its fecundity, possibly free too in the interwebs as though we weren't paranoid ECCOLINGUISTICS seeks to pursue all politikal affiliations through the woods, piddling in the PANTS of Benjamin, in order that the frightful polar bear adrift makes it to her Lingis on shore. His aviary—the muzic's background. The swim too long now confusing a maze. Stupid thing. Cruel seals.

To such ends, art is a means. It's pathetic, I know.

The fields have already lost shape. It came from the 80s. Of course it did on to Mars.

ECCOLINGUISTICS is beyond the field, surrounding it. Its practitioners, soon to be claimed not by these pages, abide by the chance of flooding their own rooms—residents—they are children again, who will miss the libraries.

We are not old. They wait. We are not good people.

What says love if it comes from need. Sounds like the "good"

much meant "not"—that is, "unmarked" linguistic, read away—unsystemic (strangely) objectives in the west
a poemy clearing that you go
"good" makes "growth"
in one dimension altern OFFICIAL Xulture
a proposition passive aggression consumptive
"do less" pretentious behavyr
precise pronouns for past and future

Lee and Lum give a distance and the people somewhere, perhaps Nacirema and such. To walk with Skinner's plan or Tedlock's "ethno" meant "self-poetics," even "language" and whooda thought, no structure 'are 'are percussion on a disinhibitor's blog before college kids have parked and now piss in certainty out the window "the lunatic is" seems "on the grass" again
st meoldy intending to medicate
time it with the producer's third roar it's Disney (public education

a pastime like newts' eggs) (early forms of lysergic acids inserted in the eyes) send your work along to ECCOLINGUISTICS. This is a seed. A moving beginning. It's nothing new. The battery's charged; the sky doesn't work. It's initial-stage phenotype will be a mailing. It will communicate with you as to what that means. From the outside looking in, it could evolve into something more, perhaps morph—it could be programmed already. It is perhaps a point in its favor. Something organic, bio-logic and chemically based, autotrophic, creating its first meal. The first mailing, and all subsequent mailings, will be free. On paper. To anyone who will have you—if you would like to be included on its list, send us your contact data, and it will find you. It makes no promises except this one.

Please direct your germ at:

eccolinguistics [at] hotmail [dot] com

Or:

ECCOLINGUISTICS
130 Middle St. apt. #3
Farmington, ME 04938

Keys to Missing Teeth, by Laura Kochman (forthcoming in issue 18)

2010-10-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

I. If there really is a house in Westport, it stands on gilded chicken legs. When I come near in a rental, it hops into the gummed-up lake and taunts me with the beak it wishes it had. No mill ever tilled those flat waters of lake feck and mosquito eggs. The forest on the mountain as bad as the house—impassable. Do I look like a helicopter? My blades don’t swing so wide, my eyes are not so open. Inside the foul house, there is a room full to the gills with knickknacks and dead potato bugs, some hand-made brooms in the corner. Pickerel? Small-mouthed bass? A handkerchief tied around the forehead. An unsmiling face against grained wood. Scrawled on the garage: “Gil loves Mil,” a heart still pounding under white paint.

II. Oh, Gene. Your softly cutting voice always lured me in, your tapping soles under the red moon. A milk jug landscape under the piano. The shepherdess in rosy silk, guttersnipes and penny violets beside her. If you can find middle C, you’ll always know the way back—past the grayscale abbey and o’er every mountain. Puddle the applesauce, play your hand. I’d call every morning if I could, from the balcony or the beach, across a crowded room or a pickle barrel. Every softly cutting morning.

III. Late night at the German restaurant and the dark beer is dripping. Mahogany panels surround you’d, enclosing you’d in gherkins and schnitzel. Do you’d see constellations when you’d eat your fried pickles? Would you’d know a constellation from street lights hanging in the air? A taste of turtle soup, a slap on the rear. An apron frill brushing past a white window. A whitened widow. You’d wallow in the sycamores, wade through the evergreens. It is raining outside in the German night, and you’d can’t go home.

IV. If there really is a witch in Westport, she sits on the edge of a blackened forest. She eats ferns, swallows their fiddleheads whole. Bird goddess, whooping crane, pelican mouth. Stick your nose into the chimney, give me gifts that I cannot receive. Whose birth do you attend? Whose fingers do you stroke? Go mat your hair, go mutter to yourself. Grind your teeth to bits, but don’t forget me, whoever you are. I’m going swimming in the lake, going fishing, going out into the forest where your bony legs can’t find me, where your spells and charms won’t work. Where I can eat your memory, swallow you whole, bones, bits, and all.

Provision, by Karen Lepri (forthcoming in issue 18)

2010-10-16T11:17:00.000-07:00

Of ten tides, not a single assurance. You call on the flattest stones
To show you something—like purity—

And they call back with a countertenor that takes all concert
To get used to—to hear beauty.

Many small cuts cover my hands failing to wrest
Calcification from its own affects. Every time

You suggest gloves, I look up at you like someone who says no
To protection over and over.

When sharp angles of light break across water and through the measured
Bars of our bucket, you say, it’s enough now

But I pretend not to hear. There are more of them in my hands
And I am breaking off

The largest ones. I want this to be bloodier, saltier—you said it:
We would hunt them down.

John M. Bennett on Jared Schickling’s O (BlazeVOX, 2009)

2010-10-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

Jared Schickling’s O, earnest with a touch of humor, uses an impressive variety of approaches: from blocks of unpunctuated text to words and fragments scattered down the page; from texts with lines or words blacked out as if redacted, to minimalist dicta (“I HAVE DESIGNED BOOKS/toes I have designed my books”); from a repeated half-circle drawn line, to an impersonal abstract diction and then to a very personal intimacy: “She becomes a clear morning to herself, the weightless clarity that dips to her food in consort with the outer cool air or, I no longer miss ambiguous elation.” Most interesting to me is the transition between these differing modes, as for example from the visibly “redacted” texts to the poems toward the book’s end which use the same aesthetic without the blacked out passages. From “Mailbox”: “our first blue blankey, still buried/of course, in replacements/’digs them down the sockets of his eyes’/no inspired transpositions/yr earth bound glance aloft/bearing ‘my’ skins a thought” All in all, an excellent book. -- John M. Bennett

The Needle, by Elizabeth Sanger (forthcoming in Issue 18)

2010-10-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

Would you were where my sister keeps her bones,
deep in her body, perfecting

their whiteness. I know teeth
troubling flesh, nubbin

chewed from the nail. Tasting salt
and alloy. Before we were sisters

lovers in the clipped field
whirled tarantella, courted

hillocks and the electric
fence without consequence,

swam in the abandoned
calcite quarry, its rain

dead of frogs and fish.

poems from Temporality, by Stephen Ratcliffe (forthcoming in Issue 18)

2010-09-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

3.14

pale orange of sky on horizon above black
ridge, red-tailed hawk calling on branch
in foreground, sound of wave in channel

from perception, ‘collected
elements’ as entities

complicate, remain the same,
and still do so today

silver of sunlight reflected in channel,
white cloud in pale blue sky on horizon

3.15

pink cloud in blue-white sky above black
ridge, red-tailed hawk calling on branch
in foreground, sound of waves in channel

form taken only in that way,
other origin in sense

is the ending, picture held,
certain view of world

silver of sunlight reflected in channel,
white cloud in pale blue sky on horizon

Cryptic, by Michael Brandonisio (forthcoming in issue 18)

2010-09-20T11:23:00.000-07:00

Announcement

2010-08-10T07:27:00.000-07:00

At Mixed Media Poetry, Ian Finch has posted intriguing new art works, and in the notes that follow them, he asks a provocative question: “In essence, is all visual poetry a form a conceptual language art, and vice versa, regardless of context? Or do the creator’s naming or artistic background define it? Or does the personal context of the viewer’s perception (or biases) define the experience?”

We Must Look into the Matter, by Becca Jensen (forthcoming in Issue 17)

2010-07-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

Her finely tipped points. The way her heart cut up the sky—in fixed bloom. Lay her in lilies and in violets and in praise—the trees so straight and tall, her modest eyes. Yes on either side the river lie: 1. So, over that art which you say adds to nature, is an art that nature makes. 2. Which be the flowers, as it were, and colors that a poet setteth upon his language by art. It is difficult, but above all, one must remember that behind those lawyerly arguments, those thrashing sides, sits bold in her own daylight: a woman. She adjusts her skirts. Like a god the beauty of the world—out of the earth a fabric huge. Lace upon lace. Suppose in silks or tissues and costly embroideries. Arid, rocky. A slight pink at times and on a sudden red. Or green thick in tangles green. Her head a kind of stern wilderness. One is constrained to praise. Like a god, beauty. Some tone on a hill. Canyons. Bleak-grown pines. The sea salt blue. All that wide and golden scales. All that resolving down into herself. Location being the problem. On either side the river lie: 3. The endless tyranny of a landscape. 4. Long fields of barley and of rye that clothe the wold and meet the sky and through the field the road runs by

from Thesaurus for Ceasing War, by Kate Ingold (forthcoming in issue 17)

2010-07-16T16:19:00.000-07:00

1.

and here we find ourselves
in this predictable fight
or flight pattern:

despite the parasitic nature of cowbirds,
their numbers are decreasing;

water left untended
will turn on itself;

though our motives
of management were meant to test
the instruments of large-scale movement, still;

(consider all the taboos
and occulting)

the theory of mutual annihilation
reductio ad absurdum;

ask yourself, ‘Is this an effective
stop-gap measure?’;

once carved for the highway,
the side of the mountain was
painted to appear authentically ‘rock-like’;

the rather genius
addition of spider
web protein to goat casein;

‘it’s best to think of the buried
waste as precious time-
capsules for future generations’;

so-called ‘flicker vertigo’ is
a direct result of flickering
light and is not limited to
darkness;

apply the serge
stitch
to prevent the seam from
unraveling

Announcement: Mixed-Media Workshop

2010-07-13T14:50:00.000-07:00

Mixed Media Poetry is currently looking for: (1) More Editors and (2) More Participants for the Workshop at Central Booking.

For more information, go here

http://flavors.me/sirianth

and click “contact.”

The Mixed-Media Poetry Workshop @ Central Booking is an atelier for poets, artists and poet-artists who strive to obliterate the boundaries between text and fine art. Members will present and discuss their work with other artists who labor in this unusual genre. Together, we will critique the pieces and brainstorm new directions: explorations of form and means of radically altering the perception and experience of text. Each session will also include a short presentation by the group moderator A.B. Kalinov highlighting work in this field: a poem that can only be experienced in architectural space, calligraphy made out of light, an evolutionary poem that never stops changing, and other various manifestations of the art of the book. The eight-member workshop meets every six weeks for five sessions in total, beginning in September at CENTRAL BOOKING, a Brooklyn art space devoted to all aspects of the medium of artist’s books and innovative forms merging narrative and visual art. $50 for all 5 sessions.

Conveyor, by Irving Weiss (forthcoming in issue 17)

2010-07-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

Announcement

2010-07-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

Raft, a new journal of writing, is accepting submissions for its first issue. More information can be found at

http://www.raftmagazineonline.com/

From Raft: The prior century’s cadaver casts so impressive a shadow that nearly anyone is liable occasionally to forget it’s passed. Inevitably (and we’re hardly the first to know it), a sensation of existing in between promotes anxiety. Still, we do our work now. And in this climate, the writer of value can afford neither to sneer at novelty nor to commit, as though fetishistically, to it. Not one of us, in fact, actually knows what comes next, although it is our job to do it. What is invaluable is the mere excitement of language as material with which to make things, as much sensation as sense, as much a stuff whereby to construct as a codex whereby to construe. This excitement, now as ever, trumps the thinness of fashion, trumps the straitjacket of theory, trumps the anxiety of operating within a historical fog. It is this excitement that Raft Magazine means to put first and last.

Announcement: The Avant Writing Symposium 2010

2010-06-27T18:31:00.000-07:00

August 19-21
Thompson Library
The Ohio State University
1858 Neil Av. Mall
Columbus, OH 43210 USA

AN INTERNATIONAL AVANT WRITING SYMPOSIUM

In Memoriam Thomas L. Taylor

This August 19-21 the new OSU Thompson Library will be invaded by an exciting horde of writers, scholars, artists, and others for the 2nd Avant Writing Symposium. There will be some 50 presentations, performances, papers, readings, installations, exhibits, and other events, and an untold number of observers, fans, scholars, and kibitzers. Sponsored by The Avant Writing Collection and the Rare Books & MSS Library, with additional support from The Department of Spanish & Portuguese and The Center for Latin American Studies, the attendees and presenters will come from all over the United States, Latin America, and elsewhere. All with a focus on various of the Avant Gardes active in the world today, primarily those using language in some form or other. Events will take place in the Thompson Library, at OSU’s Urban Arts Space, and at Skylab in downtown Columbus. In addition to the presentations and performances, there will be exhibits in the Thompson Library, and at Skylab, and a room dedicated to continual presentations of electronic and digital poetry and literature.

The previous Symposium, in 2002, was a huge success, and is still being talked about. So if you want to learn about literary innovation and experimentation, avant garde writing, electronic and digital literature, multi-lingualism, visual poetry, performance poetry, Fluxus poetry and texts, collaborative writing, sound poetry, international networking, artist´s books, cut-up text, concrete poetry, found poetry, mail art, video poetry, and much much more, this is your opportunity.

Thursday August 19
8 AM – 5 PM, Thompson Library
Presentations and installations
7 – 8 PM, OSU Urban Arts Space
50 W. Town St. (downtown)
Be Blank Consort

Friday August 20
8 AM – 5 PM, Thompson Library
Presentations and installations
5-7 PM, 11th floor, Thompson Library
Award Reception

Saturday August 21
8 AM – 5 PM, Thompson Library
Presentations and installations
8 PM – 10 PM, Skylab
57 E. Gay St. (downtown)
Collaboration festival, performances, visual poetry exhibit

Sponsored by:
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
The Avant Writing Collection
The Rare Books & MSS Library
The Thompson Library
The Department of Spanish & Portuguese
The Center for Latin American Studies
Skylab Gallery
OSU Urban Arts Space/The Larry Marotta Hour

Curated by John M. Bennett

Registration fee is $30 US
Pay by credit card on-line at: http://library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/orderform.php
Use invoice no. 100
Or pay at the door by check or cash (no credit cards accepted at door)

Contact John M. Bennett for further information, registration and hotel information, and/or to be added to an email information list.
Bennett.23@osu.edu
614-292-3029

I Shall Make Me a Book, by Anthony Madrid (forthcoming in issue 17)

2010-06-25T16:15:00.000-07:00

WHAT a pleasure, to explore by myself these virgin haunts of the Muses!
What a joy to kneel and drink deep at these completely un-fucked-with fountains!

I shall make me a book that can only be read by natural light. A book wherein
The Devil will have his due, and the Angel his comeuppance.

O tiny rhombus of glitter stuck to the cheek of my beloved!
You were born in a good hour to come to such an auspicious end!

I am like a girl in love, a girl from India or ancient Greece. Indeed,
I am physically shriveling like the sexy witch in the Pharmaceutria.

Sa’di, that saintly sheik, says if a woman speaks good things,
You are not to think homely or not homely, but marry her.

My dragon-bearded tetrameters! how dare you speak of marriage?
What need have you or I for a polluted exchange of covenants?

Am I supernaturally eloquent? Yes, if you’ll give me a minute. I have to
Confer with my favorite author: John of Patmos.

MADRID is just now examining Scripture with certain of the Lord’s children.
Pull up a chair—

For, if hearing a single verse of the Diamond Sutra was enough to enlighten Hui Neng,
Imagine what listening to the whole thing’ll do for a bright guy like you.

from “The Hub,” by Jeremy Behreandt (forthcoming in issue 17)

2010-06-21T09:34:00.001-07:00

the technique is low and rubber[ * ]several hoses sprawling tentacular[ * ]predications as tattered as[ * ]plastic bags as jarring slim and amplified[ * ]technique implanted behind plaster[ * ]routed under pavement through the seven districts[ * ]the hub coordinates and extends[ * ]aggregates spare memory from hibernating nodes[ * ]aggregates to itself[ * ]the hub may be accessed remotely via four secure terminals[ * ]the airport the hospital the university the chamber of commerce[ * ]the technique entices citizens with a monthly subscription rate[ * ]there are many benefits to subscription[ * ]they will not be enumerated here[ * ]subscription is mandatory[ * ]the technique is several magnitudes and delicate in its many-fibered oracular embrace

Choke-frog, by Megan Boatright (forthcoming in issue 17)

2010-06-11T16:14:00.000-07:00

This. Frogs turn white as newts in their jars, diving prayers, pale livers, solid. Functional, complete, captured and suspended, their bones soldered to the lax muscles. Flush and heavy, filling out, fleshing forward their sad balloon mouths, organs differentiated by the water. Resistant, because we have ruined them, their arms cursing us as they pucker into the water. The soft fat heart, palm thing, converted it to liver, to pancreas, a smooth dam marking the negative space of yellow water, to this, this that flakes off into the water, but we will hold it together, come into the ground, come into the ground.

“R Is For Rangitoto,” by Craig Foltz (forthcoming in issue 17)

2010-05-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

Imagine yourself in a plane of flaxy grass swimming
through the constellations & watching the buildings
glittering beyond the volcanoes. Imagine yourself

trawling through the yards of your neighbors &
breaking down their doors to insert gray shards of sheet
metal into their bony ribcages. Let their hearts bleed the

prophecies of sentence fragments & cut-out syntax. Let them
ask you to call off the dogs. These red areas are in the
shapes of bevel gears, the curved teeth converging on

the axis of their sternums. I know I said otherwise, but I
didn’t want you to read that part out loud. Catch these
symbols with your tongue & grind them in between your

teeth. One of the volcanoes has the tendency to explode
unexpectedly. Whenever it does we walk down to the harbor
& join the rest of the city in celebration. What is one to do?

The narrative calls for a cheerful input at that point, so
we trudge along. The sieve of my dreams has opened up
again revealing itself in pink salts & home recording studio

devices. If there is one lasting image this is it. Blue-flecked
fish patrol the shores while the kowhai are in bloom. A
feeding frenzy for faint-hearted birds. Imagine yourself

floating on the water alongside the bloated corpses of your
neighbors, jabbing at their torsos to see how much elasticity
the tissue of their skin retains. Honestly, it’s a bit of a pain

to sit through their sad lectures. It’s not like we remember
their talking points. You want more than an escalation of
an escalation. You want more than rising action & swift

conflict resolution. So, one day you bring home a newborn
baby just to make out the skinny in it. How quickly they
widen their frame of reference to study these events! Even

fruit, nectar & insects aren’t enough. Imagine taking it all
back & morphing into an exotic creature, your soft skin
forming a delicate chrysalis around their discarded nouns.

Mario Cervantes (forthcoming in issue 17)

2010-05-02T08:58:00.000-07:00

John M. Bennett (forthcoming in issue 17)

2010-04-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

“In Provincetown It Stops a Second,” by Melissa Broder

2010-04-18T08:53:00.000-07:00

I always felt I had half an hour
to prove nothing

was wrong with me.
Though this material was not

uninspiring, I didn't
pass. Other people passed.

Mind your itinerary angel
it'll just keep snowing sand.

I know Route Six is South
and Herring Cove is West

but hey hey Beach Forest
permit me an unknown,

permit me a shadow.
Otherwise I'm counting

every breath, unless
and until, until and unless.

Hey hey Beach Forest
let's find a way out of this text.

“BURDEN OF LANGUAGE,” by Katie Marie Nealon

2010-04-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

after Dawn Lundy Martin

Monday. I fold my poems in halves, then quarters, making cranes. It happens gently- the sounds taking shape. A beak of nouns, body of bent words, is not a gift. Is a burden. A bird in, and of language.

“The Oracle As Witness,” by Rebecca Givens Rolland (Issue 17)

2010-04-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

childhood: a bucket of what do you think will happen

of love came and found which daughter do you know

always testing for proof, signs of knowing

who’d be victorious before the battle had begun

who’d suffer under fire or hit the stake with ashes

crying out for mercy with bitter wounds

which army would be the first to cross which

would hide in beasts’ bellies for historians to find

(the men said they’d crawled in seeking food)

a hundred tasks to test if his predictions

would hold water, killing birds at a tender age

to see if the one he said he’d hit would make it

flying off in a cursed diagonal

or would collapse with a stroke of his arm

victory was less than simple, his latest burden

the lot of thieves, whether they’d pass with sacks

of valued jewels or lose their heads crying

for justice to the gods as his father commanded

teach a man to hunt and he replied I’ll bite his neck off

if you don’t know what’s coming don’t come near

Yes, Noise, or No, by Brennen Wysong (Issue 17)

2010-03-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

Buy a wolf trap and a handkerchief. Purchase a wolf-proof door. You will construct tiny cityscapes with bird bones inside snow globes. You will fill the globes with a mixture of bits of tinsel and freshly ground pepper. The wolves will in fact be wolfram. The warmth will be war. The theater will be where the war will be waged. You, inchworm, will measure the marigolds. And then, it will happen just like this: You will cover your body in a dull dusting of wolfram, hoping someone will rub against you for warmth, hoping you will bring brief shadow to a darkened theater, where the marigolds have been ushered to their seats in the wings. The wings—and they are yours, of course, attached to your back after losing your hands—will be read by X-ray tubes using the wolfram. You will try to find tumult on the periodic table of elements. It will be between flue and oxen. The theater will have no stage. The devil will win by one. You will toss snow globes of Tehran into an angry sea. Oxen, yes.

“i counted on it / well well / silent green bottles / at my den,” By Steve Roggenbuck (Issue 16)

2010-02-08T17:25:00.000-08:00

film, by Emily Frey (Issue 16)

2010-01-30T17:20:00.000-08:00

I trace my hand over and over into my notebook.

Yellow raccoon eyes bore into me.

I want to do injustice to something.

I want to exist on the bottom rung.

I saw that film about the bridge.

Everyone kept jumping off it.

Sometimes they just got the splash.

shrapnel, by Emily Frey (Issue 16)

2010-01-22T17:18:00.000-08:00

When your heart stops beating I take you to the corner of the boat.

I make your heart beat again.

But I am very angry.

A rocket takes off.

A Language, by Crane Giamo (Issue 16)

2010-01-15T17:13:00.000-08:00

that there are things and

they verge to name :: for they’re

departing sake :: they dub

theirs :: dispossessed

amid ( an orchard

=s) elusively

begs what :: noise what

:: faint such cure

Always After, by Anne Blonstein

2010-01-05T16:47:00.000-08:00

"Beginnings," by Jackie Clark (Issue 16)

2009-11-28T08:00:00.000-08:00

Constant limits like holes in the fence.
This silver island pretending not to notice,
covering angles & indispensable doubts.
The desert reads pages & pages of iconography,
lonely for an empty torso. Right now, an assembly
of sitting & standing & walking through doors.
We have learned how to wait, lending red
to promised compensation, inspired filaments walking
the cement like rib-shaking demonstratives, like an ache
instead of insistence or a sharpened profile in the periphery.
I don't know what happens when you are not near me
& I don't want to--unfinished & intent on holding true:
the strain of looking up or the rush from doorway
to doorway, the reprieve from vacancy & tented constellations.

"Found Poem No. 6," by Derek Pollard(Issue 16)

2009-11-21T11:12:00.000-08:00

“How Thou Art / The Construction and Rejection of

David Bevington, in his introduction

produces a long but partial list of Falstaffian

discoveries over the years, the “character types

fool, Lord of Misrule, mock–Puritan, picaresque

even longer and less complete inventory of these

resisted any authoritative mantle cast by these

make him nearly as popular and well studied

while Falstaff has remained so resistant to definition

"Inside the Construction," by Alexandra Mattraw (Issue 16)

2009-11-14T08:00:00.000-08:00

Inside my skin are patterns of others’ skin. A terminal, branching compass. A number I am supposed to take. Here, raw eggs replace the sun. Parched eyes, bloodshot holes where mouths should be. Nothing believable because all rends further in: Weathered veins circle ancillary. Pomp-full creaking. Even they feel observed under bruised elasticity, seven layers deep. They color what’s seen: People become bobbed heads. August buoys in mossy lakes. Sightless motors in cotton wind. What belongs and what has real entrance? In the center of the house, I pile roadside pebbles, campground seashells. They reflect themselves. I cancel my experience by describing it: Cracked leather bridles’ acrid lack. Sun spokes or yolks spin out to greener pastures. The ground isn’t soft and there aren’t orange flowers. Soil, too, determines from the inside out. Nothing gained, I return the stones. Draw the number. Dump the carapace. Grin and cast these over shoulder-grimace because salty role play only tickles wounds. Doors unhinge. Slap story backing. Pinch. Lick beneath the skin: the largest organ still dissolves in water.

"Night," by James Capozzi (Issue 16)

2009-11-07T08:00:00.000-08:00

Homage Queneau

Night: a slab

The Moor: comes close, a hex, an agony

Night: a slab

Autumn: the native wife with scimitar scathes

an agile, opened heart

Night's real snake, its arc-hot star

& God between two crosses scratches

arcane letters in–my vault & view, revolt & vowel

The wide night spits a world out

This wide night kicks, it spits

The night is a cursed world:

everything's itinerant, even its colossal mount

of Night

From “Five Forests,” by Sasha Steensen (Issue 16)

2009-10-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

beside the forest I fell asleep

and who knew whose hart had fallen

from the porch I hurt myself on a nail

and jumped about

as if the birthing pain

mothers say

some day

recedes

from memory

would be so chased away

a way

by hewers & others

20 yrs before

her:

I see baby inside

playing with curtains

will they tumble

rod and all

onto her baby body

hurting her

should I stop

this nonsense

double

back & check

or write another

word

From “The Wicker Ladder Maker” (Rewrite of The Wanderer), by Naomi Beth Tarle (Issue 16)

2009-10-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

She squats, sifts the water and finds the sea:

mildewed strips of marble.

She strains, arms to the frost-water,

troubled in heart over old wrack lines.

She wages with shield and sieve

exiled among flotsam and jetsam.

Full-fixed is her fate.

So slumps the earth-walker,

remembering elastic ships,

and fierce dolphin wars.

Often in the closet of night

she speaks her coffer full of corners:

the dead see her palms.

Tight thought box,

nozzled insides.

Muscle creak can’t stave off fate,

nor do vengeful hybrids.

Men eager to protect the vanquished

shut tissue-paper names in their chest pocket.

Wretched from care, removed from land, far from dears,

she rests her body against the sweetbriar,

and lashes heart thoughts of her garland-friend

covered in the black tar earth.

She crosses woven waves,

cluttered with bleached coral,

no web or chest of keepsakes seeking a giver—

a place salted with amber shavings.

Receive her checkered skin—

she with body, prone and banded.

Sorrow is the woman.

Exile's path awaits her as twisted gold,

pulled like taffy over butcher hooks.

Thoughts of loose spines in suit cases,

no joy, no joy in the earth.

She recalls hallways of shaking animal heads,

how in youth, swords were plastic and wands wired.

All light—varnished.

She who has long forgone riding the wooden horse carousel,

loved and peeling on the last planked pier,

knows when sorrow is too deep to extract

like ornamental shrapnel carried by elders.

From “murmur in the inventory,” by Erica Lewis

2009-10-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

---------------------------------

i was there

another person or another life

strange how one can

disassociate the days

when it separates

i owe you one or one

tarnished what you keep

locked in the basement

the lip of your glass

on the table

to tell you about it

keep your eyes shut

unimportant what passes between

how one is one's own

misrecognition

read as an epigraph

an empty room of something sparse

--------------------------------- we live in a place of corridors

it is true and not real

and you turn the corner

framing light referends

slowly

and disperse as equal

or serendipitous

he didn’t think

they’ll heat to vapor

of things not lasting at all

impermanence of waves

white lines

who had once played for the silents

go around me

you know the answers

and real and not true

From “Rambo Goes to Idaho,” by Scott Abels (Issue 16)

2009-10-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

When my fictitious involvement in the Afghanistan conflict had ended,

I owed Colonel Troutman a care package

with, Let me out. I am hope.

written on the ribbon.

He opened the box at the beach,

(we never see him snickering)

and,

all in all,

he became an old man.

I was

such a guppy.

He always

brings a lot of energy.

He is such a pilot.

When I meet the leaves

(which is what he calls his children)

I don’t want the day to be about me.

Me and the Colonel used to love to

close our eyes and imagine

this planet

not being around

for forever

having a red wine and coke

doing our little hand-dance

together we could retake this town

using only

the computers in Rambo 2.

We had a nice office in Vietnam.

Be sober, but have some beer for after

the deification of the leaders.

The President has acquired the last state in the Union

as his generic talisman

toward not getting robbed.

The myth of the playground of the Pacific

was filmed with a camera

that normally goes in a colon.

I heard they made the last mayor

eat grass and rocks and die.

He said fuck 15 times in one syllable.

It was the beginning of the weird little world

of Little James Duckbutter Brown and his sister Tapioca.

Their Uncle Harry Goal planning nothing.

Your donut made you smile,

mumbling how we suffer.

Your cheeseburger made you tired.

Did you say mismatch or mish mash?

When I play it by ear

I always fall in love a little.

I’m turning 30 all over again.

I have a huge sense of humor,

but don't spit on my porch.

Two Visual Poems, by Carlyle Baker (Issue 16)

2009-10-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

"Bridge Collapse," by Donald Dunbar (Issue 16)

2009-09-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

for Jonathan Thomas Boyd Chin

his fingertips whiten as he begins to push off faint white horizon under his fingernails The blade of his hand almost digs in, he’s using so much force his elbow straightens Look at his face: his mouth tightening up to his jaw, but no real change in his eyes no contraction of the eyelids, say But those tendons in the neck Now down here: his left leg he’s got planted, the tread bending there, but the right leg he never really gets down, does he He’s pushing off with just one leg There both his hands are free of the concrete his eyes change, they’re wider and look at them move and focus on all these different pieces spreading out below him, like mosaic, sort of like an ancient mosaic and there: the first sharp blue of the river fills the craquelure beneath him but I don’t know if this qualifies as a national disaster

"Letter," by Breonna Krafft (Issue 16)

2009-09-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

Love, let’s transfigure the world together. I will tuck tubes of matte acrylic into the waist of my jeans, fill my back pockets with various brushes, their horse hair bristles rustling against the unraveling hem of my t-shirt. You can keep rolls of 120 in a light-proof bag at the bottom of your satchel, Diana waiting for you to hold her shutter open long enough for light to ambush the silver halide, leave its mark. I can be Ayutthaya and after they burn me, you can sift the beauty from the soot; capture me in sepia and set me free.

Let’s cull the seeds from pomegranates and stain our cuticles; call each other’s names through tin cans and watch the small reverberations; crawl into caves then out again to remember how surprising light can be. I see my salvation, love, and it lies in tempera and in film.

"this house is full of breath," by Stephanie Martz (Issue 16)

2009-09-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Two Visual Poems by Reed Altemus (Issue 16)

2009-09-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

"Pack," by Sasha Steensen (Issue 16)

2009-08-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

The month hath thirty days
together

goatsbeard
gathered just west of us

is us

one of the reasons
one goes to the country

anyhow

is to be there
among its unused

things

a pack of humans
thrown together

is us

lovingly

but knowing
not

how to do it

we kept at it
and we keep

it

close

to our differences
in hidden places

like all old houses

it

had trap doors and secret passageways

leading

from above the garage
to the basement without

setting a foot
inside proper

looting one’s own home

is worse
but its arresting

interesting what remains
for you to see

when its blown down
and the safe place

is staged
a writing not proven

not willing to be
an estate

or anything like

it

its ligaments loosened
before its walls

fell
how that evokes trees

and birthing

cutting down
wood for heat

when really
what’s buried

is

not unlike
the objects dropped

in large clay pots
when no one’s looking

those I tried to fish out
of small spouts

but now someone else’s
problem

the new pack
I formed formed

by some rotting matter
and by some lovingly trying

but not knowing

just how

Word For/Word: Preview

2009-07-27T21:23:00.001-07:00

This site will be a preview of forthcoming issues of Word For/Word, and will be updated weekly beginning with issue #15, which is scheduled for late August. The current issue is available at http://www.wordforword.info/