Inventory of small joys:

Adela Sinclair’s poetry book, The Butcher’s Daughter, is available for pre-order; Paul Cunningham’s Sociocide at the 24/7 is available for immediate consumption; Magic City Poetry Festival t-shirts are awaiting your purchase as the schedule for the 2025 season is finalized; David Frayne’s The Theory & Practice of Resistance to Work is available for free download below; the sun is lingering a few minutes longer each day before vanishing into the horizon.

On the altar:

In mad love with Judith Kiros’ O., a retelling of Shakepeare’s Othello, translated by Kira Josefsson. In Kiros’ words: “In this play, a white man manipulates a black man, O, into murdering his wife. Later, O learns the extent of the white man’s treachery and responds by taking his own life. There is no other way out––he has become that which the white audience always suspected him to be. He has fulfilled his role. Curtain.”

Aside:

“Ah! ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me? If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death.”

— Oscar Wilde, Salomé

Image:

The ‘great devouring cloud’ that John Ashbery offers in Your Name Here.

“Then a great devouring cloud
came and loitered on the horizon, drinking
it up, for what seemed like months or years.”

Absence:

Among Raymond Roussel’s posthumously discovered works, there is a 632-page play and a 1575-page ‘verse chronicle,’ both in alexandrines.

Simile:

“You are like countries in which my love / took place”, where Jack Gilbert’s enjambment adding a reverb to the action indicated by the verb took and undoing the expression took place, sheer gorgeousness at the level of the line and the line break.

Process:

A concept I find difficult to ‘talk about’, partly because it feels incomplete when I try to address it. Process is something between Joana Gama’s performance of John Cage’s “Suite for Toy Piano” (1948) and jumping into a random lake impulsively, for the sake of the feeling. How does a poem get written? Generally, something bothers, irks, itches, distracts, or interests me — in a landscape, a musical performance, a scene, an image— and a secret sensory tendril sets off on its own, venturing forth, biding its time, waiting for me to pull away from life and give it attention. I never know what I will find there. Never quite anticipate what is simmering. At most, I know it will surprise me, this strange thing that accrues in the mind while one does other things.

Example. One of the teens took a photo of me leaning against a wall at an outdoor mall, bitching about how much I hate shopping, begging the teens to let me go sit in a cafe, whining that I had not even brought the right pen, being insufferable. I was actively thinking about a poem I wanted to write when she took this photo; lines were bulldozing through my brain and Crusoe was there. Those bones became two of the poems that got published in Iterant.