You never asked for protection
from love. Not even a formula
for dealing with my bar-stumble 
into the rain—stories about boys
who ground their teeth and smoked,
waiting in a red Cavalier while I sneaked out
back peeling down the wire fence.
This is what I have: the bottle of Heaven Hill
smashed into a foot of rock sugar in our street,
rusty fork from Thanksgiving
when I threw the turkey straight over
the balcony when you said you’d leave—
and the neighbors didn’t say a damn thing
about it, just stepped around the cracked plates
for days. Sometimes I can still feel the heat 
of your hand in the dark, my wanton limb
struggling for some inner step,
wishbone broken somewhere underfoot.

First Two Daily Poems Drafts for April!

Marisol's Tale


In the beginning I was an exhaustion
of split dreams. I was so many women:

the one with the fist of clenched hair, 
woman in the shape of a high leather

boot--the one who forgot the Lord's 
Prayer. What is is that comes after

I shall not want? I remember straying
in the wilderness before love. I remember

the brightness of it, driving me down 
on my knees. How do you get the best of it?

Say no to a man. Learn to be the proud
Virgin-Mary rising on her leaven. 

On the sixth day, I refused heaven.
All my words a spite of black clouds. 

Donestre Cento

Twilight is not good for maidens

Out of this dust they are coming     delicate

as grasshoppers       a light      gathering

              in the skull

Crying is a habit       with me being able

to eat and incorporate        beauty like this

                                                       heaven / bad music

Myself anyhow       maybe as old

as the universe

                                               I remember “remember” means

to put the arms     and legs

back on       and sometimes

the head.

True Writ: A Review of Alice Notley's In The Pines

           Those who self-righteously value their own contradictions are mighty on this Earth. 

            - Peter J. Carroll, Liber Null

           The poems in Alice Notley's 2007 collection In The Pines are extremely challenging to some conventions of writing. A single narrative voice, clear causality, and linear chronology are all absent--leaving the reader to try to follow the speaker's personal symbolic language and unreliable memory. The poems are deliberately difficult, alternately resembling prose and lyric, full of pronouns, images, and ideas which have no clear antecedent. The title poem offers the most difficult reading, and seems to be where the poet's intentional disruption of what is expected from poetry is the heaviest. The poet, however, does give clues as to how to read the collection starting with the very first page: "It is time to change writing completely." This statement demands that the whole book is to be read as a kind of thesis on the direction writing should or could be going.

           "The Black Trailor," the middle section of the book, introduces some of the first singular narrative voices in the collection. Poems with a stronger, more conventional narrative like "In the Garden," and "Household," are placed among the continuation of prose poems which are at the same time expansive and recursive; they repeat and inexactly reflect images and themes throughout the book. Ominously described as a "noir fiction," the title poem of the second section transitions from the furious urgency of the beginning of the book to a place of clearer recollection. Themes of past drug use, present illness, hospitalization, relationships, and denouncing of gender roles all continue over from the first section of the book. Also particularly interesting are the comments on writing life and criticisms of the poetry and publishing world at large: "Any syllable of the prior self which comes from out of nowhere is worth more than a poem by a representative of the institutional holdings." The voice here is clearly placing the experimentation, the spontaneity, the immediacy of emotion and expression of a prior existence above the conventions of writing, and the idea of writing as an immutable institution. The poet is both disowning certain ideas about poetry and engaging them by writing this work. 

              In "Hemostatic," the book's final section, Notley affords us the perhaps more comfortable visual orientation of lineated verse as opposed to the previous vast blocks of text reaching from margin to margin. "Culture Scarf," a viper-tongued distillation of the anger and conflict in the collection, assures that "This is all true writ." From the very first line ("Why should I respect, or convince, or even interest you?") through to the collection's very last question ("are you someone?") there are interrogations toward certain people and also toward abstractions. These questions are definitively more important to Notley than any proposed answers.

              Steeped in contention rather than contrariness, these poems seem altogether sorrowful, doubtful, and angry. References to drug addiction, the "mind-body" problem, conflict in relationships, gender roles, and the larger world of writing and poetry, are sometimes described using a violent vocabulary and imagery that reflects something so visceral that perhaps it could not be expressed in any other manner. The strength of these poems is their unapologetic charge toward the goal, of "changing writing completely," even at the risk of losing some readers. The collection stays true to this goal, although the bold form of the first section may lend, in contrast, a certain slowness to other subsequent poems. There are many clear themes and positions, many stories told simultaneously: because a human experience is not a conveniently organized story to tell. It is full of multiplicities, full of doubt; full of conflict and contradiction in every movement. This work is effective because it reflects the reality that not all speakers are reliable, time is not always experienced the same way, and the work of the poet sometimes involves breaking the rules to achieve a higher art. 

I am gearing up for this master class with Mary Ruefle on Friday. There is so much work to do. I am excited about my new poems with new voices, even if they are weird.

Got one of those nice, encouraging types of rejections today. I wish I had realized earlier, before diving in head-first, the scope of the rejection that comes with being a writer, and the depth of the masochism needed to accommodate it.

It needs to snow soon. If it's going to be terribly cold it needs to be terribly pretty as well.

A Thing I Have Learned

People who use the word "limiting" in a counter-argument against being accused of sexism or some type of privilege are always talking out of their ass.

New Old Poems

I have a few older poems I've been revising and agonizing over for a long time up at Dead Mule. Poems about religiosity and southernosity and stuff. Writing that southern legitimacy statement is a hell of a lot of fun.

This semester is breaking my mind a little bit having to think about Pound and Darcie Dennigan and Blake all at the same time--but I'm really glad that I am no longer scared of prose poems, experimentation, narrative fuckery, et cetera in contemporary poetry, thanks to the careful selection of texts by Prof. Petrosino. Writing about Ibsen, however, is a drag.

Looking forward to next semester, which will probably contain more French study than poetry classes. I think I'm going to opt out of the mixed-genre workshop in the spring. Maybe. Fiction hard. Mary no like! I'm probably going to do this French theater practicum which sounds really fun.

THERE ARE SO MANY READINGS ALL THE TIME and I can't go to all of them or even most of them.

Today this poem is stuck in my head. It is the first poem I have a clear memory of, and I remember listening to a recording of it. Listening to Gertrude Stein has this strange, calming effect on me; I think some of the sounds remind me of hearing sermons when I was young.

Susie Asado

BY GERTRUDE STEIN

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

       Susie Asado.

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

       Susie Asado.

Susie Asado which is a told tray sure.

A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers.

When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.

This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy.

Incy is short for incubus.

A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must.   

       Drink pups.   

Drink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine and a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail.

What is a nail. A nail is unison.

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.