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Fun Stuff Friday: Buck Downs' Dang Yall [by Jennifer L. Knox]
Posted May 16, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Meet the Poet: Xavier Cavazos [by Jennifer L. Knox]
Posted May 15, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Who Says? [by Jennifer L. Knox]
Recently during a Q&A session, I was holding forth to a room full of students on the Myth of Feelings—that feelings were the prime mover of a poem, and that every element of a poem took a back seat to them. I declared that a well-placed comma could do as much, or more, for a poem than feelings, because the reader derives his/her feelings from the symbols arranged on the page. A young woman sporting a futuristic haircut raised her hand. “Who says we have to know how to use a comma?” “Well…” I scoffed, “being a poet and not knowing how to use punctuation is like being a painter but being, like, ‘Fuck color.’ It’s one of our most important tools. It sets the pace of a poem. It shows the reader what your characters are thinking. It…shows that you know what you’re doing as a writer.” “Yeah, but who says?” I was stumped, then I got it: who was I to tell her that she needed to know how to use a comma? Certainly, there had been master poets throughout the ages who had never given two shits about it. “You never need to know how to use a comma if you don’t want to. Writing is like cooking. You can cook food any way you want. You can leave tuna fish out in the sun for a week and call it casserole…” “But who’s gonna eat it?” a voice shouted from the back row, finishing my sentence. Now having mulled over my answer, I'm pretty sure I came off like a bitchy old fuddy-duddy. The question warranted a more respectful exploration because she really didn’t know the answer. And she’s not the only one. If you’ve ever encountered students in poetry writing classes who haven’t mastered basic skills, then you’ve encountered students in poetry writing classes who don’t want to master basic skills—because mastering things is hard, and very few people like to do hard things that they had managed to avoid all their lives until you came along. Why should they learn them now—and in a poetry writing class of all places? The class that was tailor-made for comma splices! Forcing someone to study punctuation in a poetry class is a little like making someone learn accounting before they go to Las Vegas. But how willing/able are creative writing instructors to teach the basics? Lately I’ve been working on my teaching statement. In an umpteenth draft, I noted my experience teaching basic grammar, which one of my generous Proofreading Pals suggested I remove. “Comp departments aren’t necessarily hot on teaching that stuff,” he said. “We’re teaching what makes a good argument. Grammar is something students should’ve learned in high school. In creative writing classes, I'm there to encourage creativity. They can worry about the details when they start publishing (which, for almost all of them, is never).” I posed the question to creative writing teachers on Facebook: 1) Do/should you teach writing basics in a creative... Continue reading
Posted May 14, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Meat the Poet: Jennifer Tamayo [by Jennifer L. Knox]
Posted May 13, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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A Portrait in Ellipses: Russell Edson, 1935–2014 [by Jennifer L. Knox]
Posted May 12, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Trying to Count Everything: A conversation between Jennifer L. Knox and Alan Michael Parker
Posted Oct 1, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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NaPoWriMo Poems Day #30: Finish Line
Posted Apr 30, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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NaPoWriMo Poems Day #26: Home Stretch!
Now you’re really in the home stretch of NaPoWriMo, scribblers! If this was a marathon, you’d be peeing blood by now. Today’s prompt, an elegy, which reminds me: I especially love, “Blue looked at the possum, then he looked at me.” Our own gaze pales next to our gaze returned. Devotees paint eyes on white-washed stupas, eyes on statues in Hindu temples because we visit the Gods to be seen by them. An animal that sees us—that cuts through its instinct and collar and cage bars—is a most worthy subject for a banjo elegy. Now, onto the poems! * 23.
Look. The moon sits like a baffled bride.
Still time to fix things by morning.
If you tell the truth, they’ll leave you a bed and blanket. Deny it, they’ll bury you in your family’s yard. Quit wasting time
polishing your teeth and renouncing gravity.
You will fall when it’s time to fall. Posted here, if you have Facester. * Latchkey Kids I once made a fireplace out of aluminum foil curved its edges up, for safety. Tore paper and lit it. Yellow to brown, then ash. It was a nice fire, rather tame. The carpet below came up with the foil, long strings of black plastic and a smell. We used to put on our roller skates and ride in circles in our unfinished basement. Spin around some pole and throw ourselves away, at top speed. In the many construction sites near our townhouse we’d use 2×4’s to walk above newly formed basements and rooms. We never fell. Brambles grew in a field nearby, we made rooms in the midst of them and dragged discarded lawn furniture, called it our house. Sometimes meeting random adults along the way. We always went trick or treating alone, and ate candy on the way home. Then we played trade. After watching Goonies, all the kids in the neighborhood banded together, pulled up manhole covers, walked tunnels that linked development to development. Didn’t wonder what the wet was or from where it came. My brother and I would sit in the backseat and stay unbuckled. We’d pull up our feet and hold them at the ankles and let the turns throw ourselves into one another. The goal was to stay upright, even at fast speeds. Our Dad would only yell if we laughed too loud. We’d mix potions up with things from under the sink and all the weird spices we inherited when Grandma died. We’d take turns tasting them. Countless hours at the very empty playground, with just one friend. We’d take my friend’s mother’s pantyhose and pretend to be robbers of kidnappers, covering our faces in that brownish mesh. Rode our bicycles along the main road. 3 miles to Arby’s. No helmets. French fries and every condiment and pickle in the condiment bar made for a cheap lunch. Posted here. * XXL Naked 1) Stopped at the clinic Lips black ain't smoke no blunts yet gonna get you High... Continue reading
Posted Apr 26, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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NaPoWriMo Poems Day #22
Posted Apr 22, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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NaPoWriMo Poems Day #18
Ahoy, Scribblers. If you written 18 poems so far, give yourself a pat on the back. What the heck, give yourself a nice, slow French kiss. You’re hotter that Georgia asphalt, and you've earned it. Today’s prompt: a lullaby, which reminds me of this song. I have four birds, and they love to listen to this at night. How can I tell they love it? Because I love watching them listen to it. Translation: "The Balsam Flowers" The Flower of Balsam, one dyes on one’s fingernails. The words of one’s parents, one must dye in one’s heart. Ships sailing the night seas take their bearing by the pole star. The parents who gave me birth take their bearings by me. One has to study and to master the name of constellations. But the lessons taught by one’s parents are no mastered by study alone. Even gems and treasures will rust unless polished. Polishing my spirit night and days, I traverse this transient world. When the sun rises, I shall go off to study. Please plait my hair, my dear mother. The Flower of Balsam, one dyes on one’s fingernails. The words of one’s parents, one must dye in one’s heart. Now onto the poems! * Dear Twentieth Century, As a very small child in the Nixon years, even I was tired. But there's ironic satisfaction to be found in Carole King's "It's Too Late" being number one the week you were born. I wasn't your best citizen. I couldn't fix the business of the Panama Canal in my mind, try as I might, sitting in pigtails and watching the news. And even though I knew about Ella Fitzgerald at a very young age, I thought her first name was "Ellafitz," last name "Gerald." Dusty Springfield and Buffalo Springfield drifted unmoored for years for me, intermingling. Roxy Music seemed important, but insidious. It was all the disappearing sixties then, louche magic and hips. All I mean to say is I miss my can headphones. Car window handles. Decaying Chevy upholstery. The smell of warm grapes and peanuts at Pope and Airey's grocery store. The world had heft and weight to it then. We had Charlie Chaplin and Richard Pryor then. I was born at the exhausted end of a barbarous century, but we had the good people. Stop children. What's that sound? Everybody look what's goin' down. You don't have to say you love me, just be close at hand. Posted here. * Ideas vs knowledge I'm going to drop wearing nothing but a paper helmet I made just now, when I crash the water I'll sail my hat like a slumbering bat. I'll grow deaf and dehydrate from loving leeches, my sponged sight will drench in world. Posted here. * Love Poem I've forgotten again what derelict means. Desolate, abandoned, ruined, you say. We exhale hot on the lenses of our glasses, wipe them clean, walk away from the future, artificially bright. When people hear explosions, they hold on tight,... Continue reading
Posted Apr 18, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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NaPoWriMo: The Halfway Point
It’s day 15, and all downhill from here, NaPoWriMoers. Are you hallucinating yet? Excellent. Today’s prompt: a parody. Here's a fine example from the cinema. Now, onto the poems. Nate on a Plane Pt. 1 “Fritz is the name I gave to all my dachshunds,” says the dermatologist sitting next to me. The dachshund’s eyes are howling something not Fritz. He doesn’t look like a Fritz. “Even the girls,” he says, “I named them Fritz.” Something still feels off. A flight attendant stands in the aisle, her hair swaying like wheat, despite lack of wind. “Is there anything else I can get you?” she asks. The dermatologist asks for some water for Fritz. My eyes are dry. The reading light has gone nova. Posted here. * 15. I celebrate the tanginess of your gruntly curves, amorphous, as sweetly mispronounced as the hush of pampas grass. I enthuse about you. Watch me rotate it with this toggle made of syllables. I want to be accommodating, as concise as water. When you don your armor as shiny as Corvettes I ping all over the place; I chew faster and with a bawdy smack. The days you’re gone float like goldenrod savannahs replete with polecats instead of big tawny ones. Am I imposing again, repositing the denim fantasy, the one we’ve mocked of all its flavor? Wring it again. The optics are still pristine, the audio sharp as architecture. Posted here. * Beachcombing Robots Last ocean & blue sky. Beachcombing robots supercede us long after we’re gone. The segmented hoses of their gentle arms— violence is stoked by hunger, despair by thirst. To take it all in, like a steady stream of irritating smoke. Even under your skin it’s still you—a million little reactions you have no idea about. What does it even look like inside your lungs? To this day, still a mystery to yourself & everyone else. Mysteries sell very well, but not yours—unsolved & with no apparent motivation. Posted here. * Friday the 13th The Knights Templars and freemasonry are best exemplars of superstitious ennui. In 1307 13 October, It wasn’t heaven ‘twas a Friday, sober. The pope, the king arrested or killed the Masonic ring Bad luck fulfilled! And so on this day Masons remembered the unlucky way Freemasons dismembered. The 13th, Friday, is not for a monk it’s a mason’s day to get stinkin’ drunk. Posted here. Continue reading
Posted Apr 15, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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NaPoWriMo Day #12
Posted Apr 12, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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More NaPoWriMo Poems, Day #11
Posted Apr 11, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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NaPoWriMo Poems Day #2
Get this: they're up to 575 participating sites over at NaPoWriMo! Today's prompt: Write a poem inspired by the song that was #1 on the day that you were born." Make a mine a "Green Tambourine"! Onto the poems! * "It Must Have Been Love" It must have been love and the breezy projector screens that made you leave. You took the backdrop and the car keys, but you left me my wheels. Take the chess board, but leave the pieces. It's over now. You rocked out at my bedside, leaving me unsatisfied. It must have been love, because what else would tell us "Matching haircuts are okay." Posted here. * True Story Sonnet Apparently when my pawpaw was a pastor it was at a joint called Stampede Baptist Church in a little town called Moody, Texas, a name that fit. Then he fell in love with another woman and left the church to get a divorce. The citizens of Moody dropped their jaws and plenty of opinion fell out. He never quit loving firecrackers, the kind you blow up on the 4th of July. Maybe the other kind too. They stayed together until he died, a failure of his heart, and we kept visiting her until she died too, years later, still wearing his ring. Mamaw never spoke of her that I recall. Run over there now, he’d say, laughing, lighting the fuses on a bunch at once. This one’s gonna really wow you. Posted here. * Symbolic Ornithology Curious how cultures can determine Deeper meanings for simple beings. For instance, take the humble bird: Biologically, they’re feathered vertebrates, Warm-blooded, with wings, who lay eggs. And logically, they’d be nothing more nor less. However, such simplicity is not the case. Because I can say, with confidence, That seeing a blackbird or a raven Would warrant worry, while witnessing Bluejays and doves in free flight Often signifies a cause for joy. Peacocks can flaunt beautiful feathers And mock buzzards with their timelessness. And birds of prey personify power. Why else would eagles and hawks Be seen as nothing but majestic? And clichés clench a culture for a reason, As point-of-view is important to a story Centered ‘round a beautiful swan Who perceived itself as an ugly duck. But are these seemingly arbitrary perceptions fair? Who says you can’t find a raven gorgeous, A buzzard pure, a duck majestic? Why isn’t a peacock’s plumage gaudy, Or a hawk’s flight innocent? Can’t doves make mistakes, bluejays die? Or maybe they’re all just fucking birds. Posted by Chris here. "I'm the leader of the Hungarian Academy of Science and I will harden your aircraft shelter. I'm 18 and pretty damn gay....I ship a lot. I read a lot. I write a little. There's an about me now!" Continue reading
Posted Apr 7, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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NaPoWriMo Poems Day #7
Posted Apr 7, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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NaPoWriMo Poems Day #6
Posted Apr 7, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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A Cento Made of Charlie Sheen Quotes by Ken Taylor
Posted Apr 7, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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Conversating with Kazim Ali: Is Funny Valid? Starring Don Knotts as Emily Dickinson
Posted Apr 7, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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Twice is nice!
Funny Lady #4: Sommer Browning is Whole Ass
Conceptual comedian Steven Wright and poet Sommer Browning walk into a bar. “Is it weird in here or just me?” Wright asks. Browning listens to the silence. He hands her a screwdriver. The two proceed to remove every screw from every screw-filled object in the bar. How much support can you take ...
Funny Woman #5: Ms. Passover 2012, Rachel Shukert
Posted Apr 6, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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NaPoWriMo Poems Day #5
Are your hands getting tired yet? Today's prompt: write a poem in honor of baseball's Opening Day! I'd write one about how my head must have a ball magnet inside of it, because no matter where I am, if balls are flying around (!), I'll be out cold before the seventh quarter. GOOOOOOOOOAL! Now onto the poems! Lake Sketch —For Brian Ang What will impress the death cult? The beautiful, vacant death cult? What will impress the mirror-writing lump, water’s canto, her cinema, commerce’s atomic center? What will impress the cult of death? The cult of holes, of clothes. The cult of sharp elbows. The empress of the lake is here, all 90 degree angles. Hello empress of the lake. She answers through her teeth of zeros, in geese. To move five stones to the right is to enforce the odds. To pepper-spray a toddler in the springtime, Printemps Paris. Posted here. * Spring Thursday Everything doesn't need To smell like egg For your day to be shitty But it doesn't hurt Meanwhile the city Is not one for pity Still it feels good to ask Maybe I should move To a permanent lunch The fulcrum of every day Balanced there you see What happens everywhere Doesn't stay there Hey self here's an idea For your idea museum Let's forget we ever Breathed without singing Into each moment of Shirtsleeve weather Posted here. * Everything is Green and See-Through a friend in fashion reported. Now April in the country, my window concurs. The best kind of green is the green I’m seeing, Do you see it? If ever there was a day to fall in love with Kentucky, it might be today. Today could have changed my mind about cremation, made me want to go down into the soil and have things grow from my bones, to be buried deep in the dark dirt that keeps managing to turn out such alive living things. I’m all out of ideas for what to do with my life. So I make dinner and wait, wait for him to return from the road, and for my dog to come in frantic triumph. I like to memorize things while I wait: the way the houseplant leans toward the outside plant, and how they both look so radiant in their greens that I want to wear them while I cry the clearest of tears. Posted here. Continue reading
Posted Apr 5, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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I love Nin's work. She IS totally original. Didn't know about the cartoons though! They're hilarious!
Speaking of Funny Women: Time to Buy Nin Andrews' "The Secret Life Of Mannequins" from Kattywompus Press
If you've been following this blog, you've read Nin Andrews' Meet the Press feature for which she interviews the unsung editors of small pressses. But if that's all you know of Nin, you are in for a major treat: she's one of the funniest, most original poets around and she is also attracting ...
NaPoWriMo Poems Day #4
NaPoWriMo’s up to 800+! This thing's totally out of control. Maureen’s prompt on Day #4: write the blues, but first, live the blues. Onto NaPoWriMo! Boys As Saviors Mostly all of them. God bless 'em. Winter of 96, my vigils every night listening between my mother's snores for what. The IRA. The murderer from Seven. Checking the oven. Some contortionist. The enemies are men too, naturally. How could a girl at fifteen save her mom, her brother. Maybe Joan of Arc, maybe versus David Bowie, but the world is dark and crawling. Then those college boys slept in our parlor. Rope of garlic. Vale of health. I slept eleven hours; we all had brunch. If murderers are Dracula so are the boys. Your weakness lets them in; your weakness is boys' kindness. Let me be kind the boys say no one having taught them to bring over pie. Even you, love, even you and I began with you saving me from an unnecessary drive. I won't allow it you told my brother, the one I'd saved from being blown sky-high. You'll leave this house at once and so I drove away no chance to come back later, but still burned with saved. Posted here. * “The Child is father of the Man”—Wordsworth Areas of sun in Atlanta, southland spring. I want to drink it, but it’s not quite inside me the way the cooler weather was. Cars rattle, their hums and buzzes making the season seem ordinary, plain. What was that? I ask. It wasn’t quite like death, but knowledge is its own version of not-wanting. I remember the way I carried the same coat around from port to plane, wanting to remove everything, to remove the cloak. There was one bird in the mountains, though, a little one that sung from a rock. Oh those rocks, Alice, as good as anything, better than green zinnias and not quite humming the way the city does. That’s what I want to remember. Traveling for apology’s sake seems endless…. Acceptance? A disguised way to sink back into home, some sort of place where I’ve been wanting to fit. The sun is splitting the trees again, but not quite the way the rain made it seem before. We were high up there. There were good discussions. My things to do in Portland dress wasn’t worn there, but is worn here, to make the memory hang on to something pure. But what’s pure? Uncertainty seems to be the latest virtue, if one can call it that. At times, the ways of loving send hope out of the chest—the beginning of knowledge that can’t be measured without a common, already loved, really known, but with room for something more, entirely alive. Posted here. * Charging bayonet Plate 359—Eadward Muybridge The man with the gun must be thinking, out there is the center of his purpose. The grains of the gun's wood snug against the hip-bone. Left arm cradling the long barrel so that the tip... Continue reading
Posted Apr 5, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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Oh, Hyperpoesia, finally, someone calls me on my amputee! 1) I am very skeptical that an amputee has never stumbled through a Flarf poem 2) just because you hit someone in the face with a dirt clod doesn't mean you don't love them (maybe s/he's consenting), a 3) yeah, I went for it. Thanks for noticing. My mind searched for the most transgressive image it could find—without using sex toys—and that's what it delivered. And now I realize: I was possessed by the power of Flarf. At first, I wanted to play it safe, and then, I was like, "I'm writing about Flarf! There's NOTHING I can't say." I've never even been able to include an amputee in my own poetry for fear of alienating people, but when Flarf's in the house, I can take a bath in a tub of mule semen! No wonder it swept our country like the hula hoop!
Funny Lady #3: Swedishly Massaging Kung Fu Panda with Sharon Mesmer
If you’ve never attended a Flarf reading, picture a giant, glistening squid, hunched over the steering wheel of demolition derby jalopy, doing doughnuts around a junior high school football field at midnight. In cough syrupy pinks and reds, the seizure-inducing flood lights flutter manic Morse ...
Funny Lady #4: Sommer Browning is Whole Ass
Posted Apr 5, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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