Fifteen poems I liked from 2010-19
I lost track of what the cool new poets were doing after the Blogosphere got decimated. Thus the poems below come from writers who were cool new poets some time between 1970 and 2010, a period during which doing radical poetry was the best way to think about language, before the poets got out-Flarfed by deep neural networks. Poetry remains, however, one of the best ways to think about radicalism, and also good for sonnet jokes.
Juliana Spahr: It’s All Good, It’s All Fucked
It’s all good, I would say, it’s all fucked. And then I would breathe. And then, again, it’s all good, it’s all fucked. Again, breathe. And then, it’s all good, it’s all fucked. Breathe again. I might do this while walking. Or while driving in the car. Or while lying down, before taking a nap.
It was Non-Revolution. Or it was me. Or it was Non-Revolution and me. I was unsure what it really was. Maybe it was my thoughts. My thoughts at one minute about Non-Revolution. About the smell of Non-Revolution. Sweat, urine, sage, pot, rotting food, hay, all mixed together. Perhaps about Non-Revolution’s body. I am sure I am not the only one who has thought it exceptional, but I am also just as sure that by the standards of bodies, Non-Revolution’s is fine but not exceptional. That is the point. That is why Non-Revolution is called Non-Revolution, why they have revolution as a possibility in their name but it is a modified and thus negated possibility so as to suggest they are possibly neither good nor fucked…
Rodrigo Toscano: El Organismo
At an early stage, the Sclerocephalus learned that it could make itself feel super good by straddling its capellini-like legs and drawing hard on the edge of its “parent” volcanic rock’s micro-cratering.
A few million years later, it discovered that by rubbing a rain-slick banana leaf repeatedly across its primate groin for one eighth of one degree quarter turns of the sun’s path, that the pleasant sensation lasted for two sixths of one half eighth turn of the sun’s path.
A few hundred million years after that, it stuck a large turkey feather into a vial containing burnt bone grinds mixed with pitch. It learned that by artfully brushing the feather along a pressed sheet of wood pulp rendering quantities of goods (including slaves), The Empire expanded to new proportions, also becoming more amenable to a certain one god’s oneness…
Julian Talamantez Brolaski: Fuck Me Harder
Fuck me harder, leave the haters behind
As you know I am a slut for leisure
Arrest me on the mountaintop’s incline,
For I’ve klepted when I ought to please your
Neglected epic skin, and pull your hair.
When the people call my pigtails prairie
Step in, honey, and set the aspect square
Put me in a suit and call me Mary,
Transcoping this goy’s grist or that one’s scope.
Holy monogram, how you like to tease,
Tender cufflink, I’m hurting for the grope
That sets my alpha at its churlish ease.
So strap me to the bed and knife my garter
Until I’m screaming baby fuck me harder.
Daniel Borzutzky: The Performance of Becoming Human
On the side of the highway a thousand refugees step off a school bus and into a sun that can only be described as “blazing.”
The rabbi points to the line the refugees step over and says: “That’s where the country begins.”
This reminds me of Uncle Antonio. He would have died had his tortured body not been traded to another country for minerals.
Made that up.
This is a story about diplomatic protections.
The refugees were processed through Austria or Germany or maybe Switzerland.
Somehow they were discovered in some shit village in some shit country by European soldiers and taken to an embassy where they were promptly bathed, injected with vaccines, interrogated, etc.
Their bodies were traded by country A in exchange for some valuable natural resource needed by country B.
There was only one gag, says the rabbi, as he tucks his children into bed. So the soldiers took turns passing the filthy thing back and forth between the mouths of the two prisoners. The mother and son licked each other’s slobber off the dirty rag that had been in who knows how many other mouths.
You love to write about this, don’t you…
David Huerta: Ayotzinapa [trans. Mark Weiss, t/w for a photo of a body at the link]
We bite the shadow
And in the shadow
The dead appear
As lights and fruit
As beakers of blood
As rocks from the pit
As branches and leaves
Of tender viscera
The hands of the dead
Are drenched in anguish
And twisted gestures
In the shroud of the wind
They bring with them
An insatiable sorrow
This is the land of ditches
Ladies and gentlemen
The land of screams
The land of children in flame
The land of tortured women
The land that barely existed yesterday
And today where it was is forgotten…
K. Silem Mohammad: On Thoth’s Tits (from Sonnet 75)
A groovy day, a fish fillet, an elf hair,
A cosmonaut, a microdot, a hoedown,
A trusty door, the finest whore on welfare,
A neocon who’s keeping on the lowdown,
A purple fist, a Federalist, a sunspot,
A bird that’s got a big big butt to study,
A guy named Toots, ten dumb galoots, a gunshot,
Die Fledermaus by good ol’ Strauss (my buddy),
A grinning troll, a real a-hole, a smiler,
A dude who knows a gushing hose is funny,
An underdressed (no tie, no vest) John Tyler,
A sexy flirt, a cowboy shirt — oh honey!
I’ll flip you for a dinosaur, my sweeties,
When Uncle Pete lets Usher eat our Wheaties.
Rae Armantrout: Parallel Worlds Theory
When a new bar called
The Air-Conditioned Lounge
opens and its sign
is in old-time cursive
this is ironic because
the building
is a concrete box
and the sign
looks like a gift card,
no,
this is ironic
because its claim
is true
but does nothing
to distinguish it.
Either this sign
is a reversal
of the many
novel yet dubious
claims we endure
or it expresses
guarded nostalgia
for a time
when it was that easy
to be cool…
Alice Notley: The Girls Mature
One of the girls has had sex. I slept with that guy at the gas
station on the east end of town, where the trucks go. He’s
almost twenty, he’s too old for you. We’re Satanists, we can
do what we want. I didn’t like it very much: it hurt.
I mean I liked it, I like him, but it hurt. But maybe
it always hurts for Satanists. Did he look weird? We
weren’t very naked—in the car. Is sex right for us? I think so.
Better than hanging around graves. The Satanist
red-necklace leader thinks, the group is about to break up. I
know it. How do I know these things? Last night I dreamed
streaks of gold paint made me say things. It wasn’t
light, it was paint. It wasn’t religion either. A streak
of gold would throb and I would say words. Everyone’s
shucking us, scamming us. Everyone’s dumb, at the same time.
Mean. Do I have to be cruel to grow up?
Ron Silliman: “Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene”
Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene
some far suburb’s mall lot
Summer’s theme: this year’s humid
—to sweat is to know—
pen squeezed too tight yields
ink as blood or pus
so the phrase scraped, removed
offending thine eye: “Outsource Bush”
Against which, insource what? Who
will do it? Most terrible
predicate—high above mountains snow-capped
even in August in-flight motion
picture Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind infuriates many No
action, no funny, plot too
dense to follow, unless (unless!)
mind’s eye gives attention…
Peter Gizzi: Strangeness Becomes You
The old language is
the old language.
It don’t mean shit.
It’s not where you begin
it’s how you finish.
Everyone’s got beer muscles
when they’re young.
Try as you must.
Break as you will.
Solo in space
clinging to space.
Fuck, the air said
passing a corner,
a long ropy snot
hitting a gutter.
To know something
and fail.
Why discount it?
The onslaught of eyes
beneath a fuck-you sky.
The syntax breaks down
its mangled draft and says,
one day the poor
will have nothing
to eat but the rich.
I hate that, when syntax
connects me to the rich.
C.D. Wright: “It was hotter then”
It was hotter then. It was darker. No sir, it was whiter. Just pick up a paper.
You would never suspect 66% of the population was invisible. You would
never even suspect any of its people were nonwhite until an elusive Negro was
arrested in Chicago or the schedule for the annual Negro Fair was published or
a popular Negro social studies teacher was fired for an insubordinate letter to
the superintendent and a spontaneous rebellion sprang up in a Negro classroom
in the form of flying chairs and raggedy books and a pop bottle thrown at a light
fixture, and then, the lists of long long suffered degradations backed up and
overflowed…
Arthur Sze: Transfigurations
Though neither you nor I saw flowering pistachio trees
in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, though neither
you nor I saw the Tigris River stained with ink,
though we never heard a pistachio shell dehisce,
we have taken turns holding a panda as it munched
on bamboo leaves, and I know that rustle now.
I have awakened beside you and inhaled August
sunlight in your hair. I’ve listened to the scroll
and unscroll of your breath—dolphins arc along
the surface between white-capped waves; here,
years after we sifted yarrow and read from the Book
of Changes, I mark the dissolving hues in the west
as the sky brightens above overhanging willows.
The panda fidgets as it pushes a stalk farther
into its mouth…
Lisa Robertson: “Or is it all quite different?”
Or is it all quite different?
as brutal as the impersonal damp
the non-human body of the damp
feeding the stove of god.
Health is unlegislated
it unfurls raw on the table
the extent to which its meaning does not exist ripens
a thousand years pass.
The movement, just outside perception
traverses limbs, skin, organs, hair
as if it were the purpose of this sentiment not to be expressed
its scale is unknown but pervasive.
Cynthia Huntington: Some Testimony of Witnesses
Blue light in the pine barrens, a sudden rush of cold.
Uneasiness along a certain stretch of road.
I saw beings with icy red energy,
grey-white beings with oblong heads and no eyes
A blue disk hung in the sky; it seemed alive;
it seemed alive with consciousness.
I walked out of the woods. They were looking for me.
I had blood on my shirt. The only thing I can remember
is that I saw a beautiful deer in the woods.
It was almost like a mystical deer…
Drew Gardner: Faux Sarah Connor Yarmulke
The stars you file in binders are first
thought breast thought to get you to first base
or at least to eating paste, though I use that more
out of extracted personal history and laziness
conserving energy from anything where years intersect
with the flat earth society of wearing my uncertainty on my sleeves…
15 favorite poetry books of the decade:
Juliana Spahr: Well Then There Now
Frank Lima: Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems
Fanny Howe: Second Childhood
Elizabeth Willis: Alive: New and Selected Poems
Ron Silliman: Revelator
Ron Padgett: Collected Poems
Daniel Borzutzky: The Performance of Becoming Human
Claudia Rankine: Citizen: An American Lyric
Rodrigo Toscano: Deck of Deeds
Lisa Robertson: R’s Boat
Christine Wertheim (ed.): Feminaissance
Fanny Howe: Love and I
Chika Sagawa: Collected Poems (trans. Sawako Nakayasu)
Julian Talamantez Brolaski: Advice for Lovers
Rae Armantrout: Partly: New and Selected Poems