a condensed open mic, blantant self-promotion, and interesting websites

Emma:

1) At open mic nights, I have a habit of keeping a pencil in my hand, and letting it go while I listen. So I guess this is a possible precursor to rough drafts. Perhaps full poems will result. Does anyone else do this? Similar pages, or completely different?
Also, if you all are ever in New London on a Thursday night, go to the bean & leaf cafe.

1)I have a poem here: sotto voce right now. Each year they also publish a print anthology, and while poems are up you can vote on them to be in an annual anthology. If you could take the time to read it, and, IF you think it should be printed, vote for it, I would so appreciate it. Also, poke around at some of the other work, and vote for things you like, and consider submitting. It is a nice place.

3) A friend sent me a bunch of word-related links the other day. If you haven't seen them before, you may find some interesting.
one word
hangout
graphic poetry

Joan of Arc in Dreams and Time Machines

Eric,


This isn't a poem but I'm going to post it anyway. I would really love some feedback on this. Right now, it is in a really rough state. I wrote it at 4 in the morning when I couldn't sleep. Just wrote it straight through. There are no edits to it yet. I've been reading some Donald Barthelme so that's probably why it is sort of odd.

"Good morning," he whispered to his pored face. He enjoyed his breath turning the mirror white. Although he never wrote on the fogged glass, he wished he did, and he always tried to think of witty things to put there so that when he came out of the shower there would be something pithy to amuse him and keep his mind off of his cold body. He never did.

Sitting in his idling car in the garage, he thought of Tess and of her curves. His Honda didn't have curves like that. Neither did his wrists, which he was staring at. Rather, only she did because they were her curves and because she owned them just like she owned the pictures they took together in New Mexico last August as the sun was hot and they sweated making love in the hotel room before seeing the desert and its rockfaces. He told her they weren't as pretty as she was. She told him that's bullshit. They're gorgeous.

That day the highway was packed and NPR was fundraising so he listened to a mix he made last december. It played their favorite songs. He threw it out the window and felt stupid because he actually liked some of those songs and really wouldn't have minded listening to them. "So this is it."

Work was shit but it always was. He would have quit but he made a lot of money and that allowed him to enjoy the good weed he never had in college. Tess still had his bong though. On a post-it note he wrote "Get bong from Tess" and stuffed it in his pocket where an engagement ring, a pack of cigarettes, and a boxing knife kept it company. The bong would never be gotten and the boxing knife never used. The cigarettes would be discarded after the usual mind palpitations over their cancer and his death but a new pack would take their place soon after. He never had the balls or whatever to quit. A constant theme in his life that was, never quitting. Sometimes he thought that's why she left. It wasn't why.
She left because he wouldn't stop talking about Joan of Arc, how he saw her when he slept every night and made love to her in his dreams, which he didn't believe were dreams, which he believed were real. In dreams, he told her, you can meet the dead. But he was coming to love Joan and Tess could understand that because she filled their breakfast and dinner conversations: how her chain-mail felt against his bare skin, stuff like that. And after he started getting books about her from the library, she got worried and got him a shrink who he never really went to. He just went to the library and read more, eventually deciding to build a time-machine because dreams were no longer enough and the weed never really brought him to her. The tools and equipment for the machine came in the mail last month and when they did and she saw them she left, knowing what was coming. She took the bong, needing it, as well as his weed.

The time machine didn't work like the ad said. It just made noises. And blinked. He left it on when he slept. It was soothing. After that night's dream of her and her christian lips, he decided that suicide would be a good idea. He bought a boxing knife, thinking it would be quick that way. For days it slept in his pocket, as he slept more and more, trying to be with her always. Tess would call sometimes and break his dreams. She needed to get her stuff. He stopped picking up.

Driving home, he decided it was time. The impact wasn't bad. Metal against metal. Sleep. Joan. Blackness.

A dispatch from the fringes of Wordsmiths

Hey everyone, this is Andy. Even though I am not exactly a card-carrying Wordsmith's member, I like the looks of this blog so far. Anyway, I assume that if I got the email about this, I am qualified to post so here's a poem. I wrote it using a series of Google searches with an ear for sound.

Attention to All of You in Adulterous Affairs!

I have noticed your pretty pink alcoves,
your flexible travel fantasies,
the seemingly exhaustive lists
of shiny new allures
on the backs of your scapulars.

Properly-trained ministers never fail to identify
these blunderous middle class ventures.
Let me welcome you to my homepage.
Let me drop on you my bag of Salvation.

Let me gently point out that we do not
regularly expose ourselves to inquisition:

What are your guidelines for electronic communication?
What do you do when you are alone in a parking lot,
eaten alive by your rat-like sense of self preservation?
Would you recognize a legitimate divinity if you saw one?
Has your address changed in the past 12 months?

Picture an awful lot of very cold homes.
Visualize everything you would normally do
when confronted with overwhelming confessions.
Believe me when I tell you what Americans believe.

Your misery extends beyond your inbox.
Your mighty conquests end in the kingdom of error.
At least you’ll admit it to your friends.
Now admit that planetary bodies are regulated
by divine immutable laws,
that troubled men cohabitate with true red-bellied vipers.

Renounce the inward spiritual infidelity in your academic work!
Embrace this jealous intervention of my thunderous impulses!
Jesus is a passionate lover pursuing his Match dot com bride!

this is more

Emma:
of a silly sweet poem than anything else, but I think the line about sweet gadgets is so perfect, and have had it in my head all day without knowing where it came from, so when i finally googled it and found this i had to put it up.
and as far as light-hearted love poems go, i am rather a fan of this one.
I think you're wonderful by Thomas Lux

The Advance

Jordan:

The Advance


I.
Gallops on a high arched hill
the Troupe’s nigh this morning.
Every man knows his end,
yet fate, he may not rescind.
The wizen willed warrior
Hardens his hide for the fight at hand.
II.
Expel your fears, your burdens,
so that you’re free to kill,
to wound for your mother soil,
for the dirt that’s worth less than you think.
Less, maybe, than the nameless, homeless
flesh that receives your murder tool,
in a most inconvenient place.
III.
Not for you, no,
not inconvenient, the loss
nothing more than the hassle
of having to wipe another man’s life
from your state- issued steel toes.
IV
Another man’s smile set on your steel toes,
You, the perpetrator,
the inciter of spatial lapse,
synapse- space betwixt matter,
space that spans the years,
within which the victim changed in a story of
Myriad mile metamorphoses,
millions of miles,
of miles unmeasured,
moved, yet minute
there to inform you of that contained
betwixt brain flesh and flesh,
axon and dendrite,
number and number in a fucked up
mind puzzle,
which cannot be solved by glancing at your neighbor’s
sheet, screen, Face.
V
Face,
aggregate of synaptic space
the enemy visage that looks at you from your
State-issued steel toe mess,
Face, face, fucking face it-
you know not,
what more than a smileless neural heap,
a half-wit heathen in a sick grenadine charade?
What more than
your only inconvenience?

I don't know

Eric:


"Just pretend we love each other," Jonathan Herbert told Phoenix, who was just taking off her bra.
"Okay babe, whatever you want." She kissed him.
"Oh," Jonathan whispered.
"How was your day, dear?" she said, licking his ear.
"Shitty...Michael kept messing up the orders." he said, inserting his penis into her vagina and beginning to breath harder.
"Oh!...I'm sorry, dear."
"MHh...it's okay, babe. Wasn't your fault."
"Dinner's on its way."
"Where'd you order it from?"
"Some pizza place we had a coupon for." His arm went around her.

Recede----> (Happy June everybody)

Jordan




With the unison strike of a thousand once-gilded bells,
giants crash to scorched pavement.
Not gracefully.

Cuff links whose purpose wanes quickly.
Why contain the erupting flesh-fat
that draws the skin from wrist bones,
like rusty sinkers would,
a cloud of squid mush from
from an angler’s reel.

Two thousand leagues from certainty,
yet anyone will tell you what he knows.

Do you have anything to add to that?
Baby, baby, baby it ain’t easy.
Not so helpful a hint,
but twas a good try,
and would have been
in a scene of newspaper clad midtown bums,
not so graceful by Anyman’s standards.

Not gracefully putrefying once-pretty pastures,
comparatively~ innumerable grass blades pregnant with liquid.
Comparatively~ pretty putrid, pretty putrid, pretty putrid,
against a postcard backdrop.

Anyman’s land’s pretty putrid against a postcard backdrop,
lest we embellish.

Skin drawn from wrist bones of anorexsaurus rex,
Rex, rex, reflex,
and the ground shakes when something heavy hits it.

Heavy hits the ground,
the sinker, two thousand leagues from its nylon womb,
its receptor moves to accommodate new life, new lead.

No recoil, rebound, reserve.

Not gracefully,
lest we deserve.

poems found while cleaning, and an unedited poem.

Emma:
Cleaning out my desk this afternoon, I found piles and piles of poems people photocopied for me over the years. Oddly, a great number of them were read at various meetings/mics this year. Here are a few that I don't think were.
Nude Interrogation By Yusef Komunyakaa
Sunday by Timothy Liu
Poem by Frank O'Hara
Kong Tries for a Mature Audience by William Trowbridget

And here is a poem I just wrote. Sort of a different tone maybe. I have not edited at all. Suggestions and observations?

canning
i will slowly fill
jars with snapshots. i will boil
the jars, to seal the rubber edges.
i will hold them up
to a window and admire
the ruby, citron, emerald
as the light stretches fingers
through the glass. i will save
them through the winter, stacked
on my pantry shelf between
boxes of tea and food coloring,
the edges of each photo
crinkling and grinning. in february,
i will crack, with a spoon
i will pry the lid from one jar, and greedily
we will scoop out the contents,
lick ink and chemicals
from our fingers, scrape the inside wall
clear with a paring knife.
we will try not to look
at its siblings, shining rows
marinating in the next room--

hunger can be too much.