Sunday, 27 May 2012

Sunday Poem

IT ALL KEEPS

There are bells under your shirt.

An eye is an apple.

An eye is an apple.

And you have an orange for a waist.

Your legs are straws that draw water
to your shoulders.

Red and white striped straws.

Your laughter, when it comes, are fronds.
You clutter the sky with your green laughter.
I buy a grape
from your ear

and you hear me.
You give away
the grapes, green, from your ear

as I speed in this limitless blue.

I spiral in my yellow balloon
through your height.
The knotted ginger knees
up into the net of fronds,
and the leaf wrists
above you.

Each shoulder a fountain.

The hands . . .

I spiral through your height
untying the air
I pass through
in my yellow balloon
waving,
hello, hello
From Floating Life (2012) by Moez Surani.

Friday, 25 May 2012

Verbatim

"I pretended I was a small woodland creature, like a squirrel or a bunny in a burrow, late at night under the covers in my princess bed in Prince George B.C., circa 1980."

Elizabeth Bachinsky's earliest memory of being creative.

Thursday, 24 May 2012

Is the Postmodern Poem a Dead End?

Leontia Flynn thinks so.
"Rather than figuring the endless textual networks with which we have all become so familiar, I want to stop clicking, scrolling and speed-reading and shuffling on to the next song, and instead focus on poetry which stays still and feels something. And this is what I want to write too. Not unmediated self-expression, of course, but not pre-emptively cut off with a glib reflex."

Monday, 21 May 2012

The Poetry of The Taliban

Stephen Marche reads the controversial new anthology, and finds himself unexpectedly moved:
At least one senior American military observer has suggested a war of “counterpoetry,” which would have sounded insane to me before reading this collection but now seems both reasonable and completely impossible. What does it matter if we control the cities and the battlefields, so long as they control the narrative? The narrative is all they need to win. And their story is in the hands of brilliant, often anonymous storytellers.

Sunday, 20 May 2012

Sunday Poem

WITCH'S TIT

Not particularly cold, it blushes slightly, a tiny bud
in the shadow of my left breast. You’d think it a freckle
or a mole and not be as far wrong as those who
four hundred years ago
would have burned me alive at the sight of it
after, of course, a significant interval of gratuitous torture
involving spikes being driven into various parts of my
tender anatomy and ending not in confession
but in exhausted and probably unconscious silence.

But who convinced the witch-hunters that evil marks the flesh?
And who was not deformed back then by something or other—
the body a map of disease and malnutrition,
stinking, lice-ridden, with bleeding gums and falling hair,
eyes clouded by cataracts, lids drooping with palsy, limbs trembling with ague,
pocked with sores, tumours, abscesses and ulcers.
Yet they ignored clear evidence of our shared mortality
in their search for one singular blemish, an extra nipple
with which to suckle a satanic familiar.

You’d think that centuries of plot and counterplot would have revealed
that most successful villains are unremarkable, their bodies
as fallible as ours, their faces as plausible, their stories
as full of lamentation and excuse. That the hand of God
if it bothered to write to us at all would surely be less
inscrutable. But no.
The encryption of the universe continues beyond our comprehension
as we study the marginalia on each others’ skin
blinkered and enraged, seeking somebody else, anybody else,
to blame.

From The Smooth Yarrow (2012) by Susan Glickman.