Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power. — Joan Didion
Another example is the term glamour, whose first definition is given in Merriam-Webster as “a magic spell”. Originally it was believed that witches possessed the power of glamour, and according to the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, witches by their glamour could cause the male “member” to disappear. In modern usage, this meaning has almost disappeared into the Background, and the power of the term is masked and suffocated by such foreground images as those associated with Glamour magazine. — Mary Daly
Anita Loos
You have the summer to work it out ... flash anthology will post around labor day.
This flash anthology is the one most likely to become a print anthology, btw.
[flash anthologies can be drafty, and all poets everywhere are permanently invited]
Bc I think we've learned all we can from the patriarchy at this point, no?
And our splainers include ... Sarah Anne Cox, Sarah Crewe, Marisa Crawford, Sarah Crewe, Michelle Detorie, Krystal Languell, Sophie Mayer, Lisa McElroy, Hassen Saker, Elizabeth Treadwell. [Additions always welcome.]
But first some VINTAGE GRRRLSPLAINING
****
Provenance and Manuscripts
by Sarah Anne Cox
She owns the sense of what it means not to be him
Bound inextricably to these walls
dark and wet with breath
coverings of veils and chants
She owns it but not the text
she owns the outsides of the words
both jagged and round vowels
the sharp serifs belong elsewhere
Surmising the abundance of verbs
we looked for her on the sides of buildings, the
symbol of a stone mason’s
double axe under
then under and facing sideways
the inconsequential still leave a mark
****
3 Poems
by Marisa Crawford
[Untitled]
Don’t go in J Crew. It’s too depressing.
Don’t go into Bloomingdale’s either.
Look for the hot guys. Look for yourself in the hot guys.
In the ice cream truck as it drives by.
We used to call the ice cream truck Charlie
’cause that’s was the ice cream man’s name.
And also what they called the enemy in Vietnam.
When I choked on the cupcake, I whispered,
I’m dying. When the plane hit the tower,
my dad knew without knowing.
When a bomb explodes, it makes a sound.
At the party all the women say,
keep me away from the cupcakes.
Keep the cupcakes away from me.
I was looking in all the windows.
The mannequin looked like you.
When you were sleeping, when you were leaving.
It looked like me too.
Interplanetary
I thought of something but now I forgot it.
How my boss and my sister went to college together.
How I met Emma in the year 2000 and since then we
have both moved forward in two straight but totally
separate lines that revolve around the sun in orbit.
I am sitting at my desk & I’m sitting in outer space.
I thought of something but now it’s gone.
The only way I could get to work was just
to turn off my brain and be dumb, dumb, dumb.
And then my brain got stuck there.
Hello from there. I’m texting in the middle
of the street I’m so dumb.
I’m slamming against the hoods of cars I’m such a dummy.
I used to start all my letters with "I’m sorry."
I’d seal them in pretty envelopes and draw
giant s's on them.
Sorry, sorry, sorry and bright and shining.
You can walk into people everywhere & just say, sorry.
Say, that happened in my dream last night, and,
oh I’m still asleep. Sorry my shoes are so ugly.
Sorry my skirt’s so short. I had this idea
but then it floated into the ether. Sorry
my bangs and my stories are so long.
Holiday Eyes
Don't let me cry at the party.
Don't let me drink like a monster.
I'm going to kill myself tomorrow.
Hyphen this, hyphen that.
I looked so all-American in the picture of us
where your finger was up my nose.
If you miss me just say so. With your arms.
Ring a bell. I sang, I'm proud to be an american,
ironically. I cried a single space shuttle tear.
I killed the fruit fly with a Starbucks napkin while saying,
"bitches get stitches."
Alice on the phone at work said
the landing page was halted/I heard "haunted."
I had a dream last night that I thought about throwing
a beer stein at my boss's face,
and she instantly knew my thoughts,
and then fired me. I’m a creep.
How I think about you at night when the world's ending.
Oh it’s one o’ clock. Oh I’m thirty.
I live in New York City. My hair is turning gray
with excitement, Leland Palmer style.
In 8th grade words felt edgy. People had secrets.
Scary feelings filled the room like shadows.
Music from violins.
I’m talking to myself in front of the bike shop.
I’m channeling Shannon Hoon eating corn on the cob
in Jackie’s closet. I’m channeling myself
in 2007 getting ready for the party.
I can’t even look at you I’m channeling the party so hard
& I’m projecting outside my body so far.
Separated-at-birth twin sisters connected by
long bungee cords on the astral plane.
You caught me repeating the name of the lost
dog on the poster. I reached into my bag
for my phone, and pulled out a Kit Kat.
The pile of mail has gotten too big to look at.
The FDNY shirt has too many holes to wear.
The astral plane has gotten too hard to navigate.
Too many places to see while I’m there.
The girl at MAC made my makeup look like Amy Winehouse’s,
so now I have her song stuck in my head.
And I keep singing it out loud in public,
which is stupid, cause my makeup looks like hers.
Oh we miss you Amy. We miss you childhood.
We miss you parties. Miss you Tiffany Blue.
Joyride to your grave, and start there.
Go ahead, be a dead girl. Domesticity kills.
Your success is well-deserved, but it isn't the man
I voted for. We don't have that kind of time.
For those about to rock, we've embedded
a literary reference. Black the black that expands--
black is a color. Your maleness is in the grave.
Everything gets killed. Nothing a magnetic black.
Everything a dead girl participates in.
Nothing your maleness can't expand.
The compliment is a judgment like finally. Mary Ruefle warned
me success would ultimately be unsatisfying. Always/never/other.
Into the black, and it isn't about color. Into the dark and it is.
When the only pleasure is sleep, that treasure of privacy.
Mary said I'll be the one who looks very sad. At the airport.
Time resolves unless you're the dead girl. And what a problem.
GRRLSPLAIN
Theraflu makes me feel sexy. The pieces of the future are starting to get in place. I don’t like to keep Advil in the house because taking pills is for the weak.
A little bacterial infection is not just about some funky discharge. A statement about back pain makes me forget my tattoos because that’s not me. Swipe back. Try to help out. We’re creating a sonic commons just as Lady Gaga comes on the pipes. A dream table.
If I don’t trim my winter bush I’ll just wear shorts in the pool. I will dye my hair an immature color. The decorative element for men is just popping zits and plucking shoulder hairs.
I’m finishing the travel size decongestant to demonstrate how I am hard core and/or the frailest. I have also been soft core. This listing of qualities is for the time between major events, a survey of one’s utter lack of concern.
Ask your pharmacist. No, really lean in and ask your pharmacist what you should do. Don’t back off until your body hurts from reaching.
If it was my poem, I’d be smelling my panties to guess why I’m in a bad mood.
****
Pearl, Dreaming, is a Tracey Emin Neon
by Sophie Mayer
My cunt, I say, is (pinkly) wet with fear. I am electric
kitty passed through neon sealed in a kinked glass. Hanged,
I am, in halls of power. This house of cards for
le cadavre exquis. At night – that is, each night – he comes
up to my door. The keyhole, its aperture, makes his penis
hard. Unyielding, makes him harder. It makes him
rage. He is in the room, then, every night: naked, a presence,
malevolent. Eight legs: a compensation for some
lack. His many hands about my neck, between my legs.
In the wet. Dissolve. This is no dream. By day, he’s all
princes, and all states I: his settled colony, enclosure, domain,
king’s ransom: where once were eyes, areolae. Nub: coin of his realm
(nb: J. Polidori, Journals (1816): L.B. repeated some verses of Coleridge’s Christabel, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley… looking at Mrs S.… suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him)
my flesh. All duty, paid. But what (more) – tea leaves
on the water – can a body do? This is a dream: every night he.
By ways and means, erases. As textbook, heart-throb, figure
in the carpet. It’s all textu(r)al, up-stitching me. Blinding
labour, unfair trade: my lustre tarnished as his crown’s
enhanced. Or: what an irritation I must be.
His need for me. That cavity in him where I sit. It is no
compensation for his tearing of me, that little living death.
But I learned some whip-sting from my jellyfish
sister. She whispers, cnidocytically, tonight leave your door
open. Oceanic, cunt-wet, the city will lap about you. We are
with you, in the flood, the gush of us: ugly, gelatinous and
tentacular, luminescent, swallowing & unswallowing our
own skin : your kin your kin. Your kin. Open your door, your
too-small aquarium. The phosphorescent sea is come
& he — needful of darkness, coward of the shadows,
silence scrounger, locked-door dependent – he is fled.
My cunt: yes, still wet, and still with fear.
I own it and (as) the krill-pinked ocean, kinked
with my sister’s neon scribbles flashing
OPEN OPEN OPEN
***
Woman Magazine
by Lisa McElroy
Find a girl and fix it
Hints and tips and lipsticks
In and Out and In and Out
Sell it Sell it Sell it
Break out all your make-up
Drape it ‘cross your landscape
In and Out and In and Out
Sell it Sell it Sell it
Eyes and hair and skin tones
Work and sex and work/sex clothes
as my swift pulse drifts
full of daughters and knowns
out of the lisa house
into my palms
onto my knees, girls,
gentling myself
with these twinings
of severity & of mercy
***
flash anthologies can be drafty, and all poets everywhere are permanently invited
the next one will be glamour/grammar and will post after a summer recess xox
[The other day I invited friends on facebook to write poems called Gloria for a napowrimo prompt ... and they did. I am planning to continue doing occasional flash anthologies this way and posting them here. The second was Hereditament and this is start of the third, Urban Consolation as well as the extra third, Altars & subalterns. More to come as they do. Scroll down for the latest.]
Sonnet for Boston
by Noelle Kocot
A flower in the window, these latitudes, iridescent.
I only wanted to touch your sleeve as you went by,
Foggy and lovely, flaking off the residue of night.
Atmosphere thickening, keep on going in the locked
City, pressed maybe against a store's glass. The
Randomly delicate windows, somewhere, there is
Certain calm, an interior recognizable on these empty
Streets. What reaches something in you, what gives
Its moments unto us. In the hotel, people move about,
Clouds in motion, whatever is dealt to you, accept it,
But not necessarily quietly. My orange quavering, circa
1990, my insoluble bond thereafter, I know you are rumpled
Into the olden sense that does not erode. Building,
Brick-edged, the shadows and whiteness are nearly whole.
*
To the Q
by Sarah Sarai
Tattooed or pimply,
briefcased, suitcased,
stinky plastic bag encased,
fists tight on pillowy
breasts or slack arms,
head atilt, aftersmiles
flickering like flickers
flick as it all streams
open and by unto us,
river, estuary, ocean
limp as a quilt on our
beach ball home and
the sun, the sun sparkling
from, glinting in, flattering
even briefcased wolfish
suits growling to steal
hearts and devour but
first we all (all) inside
the car look for marvels
(marvels) racing past.
a garland for Artemis
From virgin meadow from virgin greenery
Hippolytus places reverent
from his pure soul
As much as he hates Aphrodite, she hates him
as much
her altar bare
but scripting death
the lopsided stage
as much as children make one
impure
the night’s labors
her catastrophe a secondary consideration
*
Midwestern Altars & Offerings
(If mine was a family/culture that practiced ancestor worship)
by Nicole Stefanko-Fuentes
Black soil and peonies
a passing shadow in the chrome
a sunfish slipped back into the water
Recitations of the periodic tables
voices in the gravel
by the cars
on the porch at
the cottage at Linden Lake
Horseradish, dill
Crown Royal &
cucumber seedlings under a storm window
cleared of snow
Detroit Tigers & Lions
borscht bright roses
& rosaries
for the grandchildren
Old names & young mothers
Alexo & Stella
elemental again
*
yerba buena
by Elizabeth Treadwell
over in the copse-place, on this royal oak day
by the lake-oak, beneath the temple
send your altar’d consolations,
yo to line this threadbare mecca
with motion y contraption gracias
floating up rooting
complexity of the nude
has no unicorn today
is also spring the rumpled
caterpillar and advice re: tasers
and the test shots cops
fired off last night because they could
an epic poem only 50
copies an amazing London
performance in June should I
fade before horizon comes the whole
picture comes to grief comes to gray comes
in at the window and ignoring it my nose
roots in at the base of your neck
at everyone growing up
in the immediate all-girl
Egyptian heavy metal
talk of poetry and a glass
of wine with you storms out
in honor of the farm
whose “ideology of child-murder”
is this but ours machines
and images of cats
a voiceover gig standing
still before the fountain
which often goes on lockdown
ten years proposed as more or less
enough to forget the mass massing
snow falls not here stop this
lawman at the grocery store
been going mad be safe be over
soon about as empty as it gets the blast
is classed as either public or as
private as the face you share with anyone
/
skin comes to
tend to where
your touch lifts
off and there's
the world that
comes to hurt
*
GOTHAM
by Shanna Compton
The word grotesque
comes hidden
in a small cave.
Its meaning restricted
to an extravagant style.
Copied in factual rooms,
in the unfinished palaces
singed in the unceasing Great Fires.
It is overgrown and buried,
until broken.
It spreads
to other languages.
Long used
for decorative curving,
it sprouts foliage elements.
Generally adjective—
strange, fantastic, ugly,
incongruous, unpleasant,
disgusting—we arrive at
weird shapes In art.
Here is an audience
uncomfortable in their
collective pity.
This is a gargoyle—he is
an immense hybridity,
a fundamental grotesque.
wifthing two
a (sub)urban consolation for Elizabeth Treadwell et al
by Pattie McCarthy
suburban recompense he
says fundamental grotesque & a large
latte to go bring me the paper
work bring me double-knotted
gnawed on thumbnails bring me
stims bring me my big girl bed
volvo full of ornamental grasses
I'll be on the 2.34 I have
soft pretzels we might even have a gap
coupon for 30% off privacy
winter fall spring l'ete great now
can you say that all in English
what do you mean
a pastoral a paradise & me
without my umbrella at chaos baseball
find my body here & that praxis
the damp fixings of the internet
the stars and the stripes of
my own private mumblecock
the fake relevance of the avant-garde
the crap manliness of the same
its keen imperialism, Reese Witherspoon,
the false attachments of the scene
The other day I invited friends on facebook to write poems called Gloria for a napowrimo prompt ... and they did! I am planning to continue doing occasional flash anthologies this way and posting them here.
& so this is the next one, Hereditament, from a quote put up on FB by Susana Gardner:
"Sir, having no disease, nor any taint
Nor old hereditament of sin or shame."
Sidney Lanier; Poems of Sidney Lanier; 1916
Thanks to the poets! All flash anthologies remain in progress so do let me know if you have something to add. xo.
Oh you asked me about heraditament, we were just talking about this, about the square root of negative i. about how nothing works without it but we can’t see it. I can show you a table, I can show you 1, I can show you all the counting numbers up to the number of poets in a room, but I cannot touch you the square root of negative i or i for that matter. It’s like a body that has no sense of itself, what do they say, a vegetable, and I say identity is the cause of warts and nothing works without it.
We were drunk of course and drunk again and drunk and drunk and drunk on something I could never show you but then that’s me but you could never see it either but we did and we were and we and pronouns! How insane and irrational pronouns! But they are! And nothing works without them.
Like I don’t know if this’ a poem but nothing works without it.
*
4/11
Hereditament
by Sarah Anne Cox
"Sir, having no disease, nor any taint
Nor old hereditament of sin or shame."
Sidney Lanier; Poems of Sidney Lanier; 1916
The birds have been washed of tar oil
dishwashing liquid rinsed clean
no taint
the nested hatchlings chirp a bitter song
no yellow feathered birds left
consanguinous
clothes horse
secret illness borne to bear
arousal hedgerow
a tiny blood stain
the manifold of disease
a beggars almanac
in the ship’s window
a flea and louse
a tripod burns whale oil
then sugar
then sexual appetite
*
Hereditament
by Carrie Hunter
In the ballad of the bread.
To marry with a limp.
Dross, the invasions tradition.
Frothy dale veiled estate.
In the lows. Everyone is a fraud,
forked-tongued.
The only truth in pantomime.
Copiously.
The Real Presence's absence.
With teeth through saddened
textiles. The softened saying.
Spectre flower. Legal formula, speech act.
Our unconquerable, untranslatable name disappears.
The truth is here but faded. The first of the vine.
He is dead. He is drunk. He is the first to be drunk.
Fabulous bird we never see, always reconstructing itself.
We shade the meaning into the words.
We consecrate yesterday to the future.
I always wished I was a Thursday child.
Kerouac's hero's molars ancient from the grave.
We don't remember what burns,
we remember what moistens.
We have to take supplements for this.
Everything red crossing the uncrossable.
I could change the form.
Where salmon go to die.
Having survived the flood.
Let's practice love-feasts.
Confusion, the second stage, feeling the abyss.
Dismally bundled. That precise buzzing.
Gullible like gulping like uh oh where is that fishing line, theta.
*
A response to a lie (lit) (lie)
in two parts.
For JH, but then, not at all.
by Brooke Lynn McGowan
Part I: taking
Give me chattel
give me the hard thrust
the chains weighing body to the earth,
or chains to chair or chair that bitter undercarriage
of a rombus. It has no wheels, no house, no philosophy.
As peripatetic as a vector.
Have we thought of this my love?
You say you cannot leave, you have gone,
I go.
True, as verring air, constant in your faithless flight.
You say come.
I go.
And seek another, as she said, as I sought you first.
You say you cannot leave,
you cannot, you will not leave, you with the strength of a vector,
the f, the x, the y, values unerring.
You say come.
Be done both with your philosophy, your fixtures
--there is no open air. Only the breath gone out of beauty,
and this house.
Give me chattel
give me the hard thrust
the chains weighing body to the earth,
The slap of flesh, the blood
The stink of skin.
The curdling cry.
Have you thought of this my love?
The loneliness of the parallel line…
Give me angles and contrary strife.
The not-never-meeting of complement and correlation: give me crocked. I am not your likeness, your match, your kin or kindred, similarity or twin.
Do not ask that I look in the same direction:
the blind dereliction of abstract ambition. The landscape will rot before you reach it.
No hooks no hands no waists no vistas no horizons now:
I will cross you.
Give me chattel.
And of your body: owner.
And of your body: slave.
Chained already to the earth
~ ~ ~
Part II: Leaving.
To seek you again as I you sought me first
.
Death is not an easement.
I go.
*
Hereditament
by Kathleen Ossip
Hereditament
A large plane crashes into a residential neighborhood.
In Africa—no big deal.
In China—yeah so?
In Australia—aww that's too bad.
In England—oh really, is the queen OK?
In the US—oh god, this is just terrible, oh the humanity,
everyone a hero, and right here the captain hero
of the Fire Department, and the 911 operator hero.
—Sir, what were you doing before you became a hero?
Sometimes I think fantasy is the opposite of poetry
and sometimes I think they’re the same
and sometimes I think poetry is to fantasy
as blood is to a laugh
and sometimes I think we’re a patch of lilies
glazed with rainwater
on a wet black bough.
*
Beyond the Reach of Taint
by Sarah Sarai
When the wave recedes across
terrified fathoms and
walk-on sand is swept by
oceans' untouchables moonly moved
on mother globe (our sprawl)
When sun stains thighs (or love) and
we are mounted by kelp and esoterica,
by minerals of swampy seas a harvest
When barnacles tattoo buttocks with
pleasure forfeiting fear as if
in a trance as if Earth enmass were
dervish like angels spinning on the
beloved enchanted to be
itself (Earth) a mother a mother itself
of living and the dead, sexing and
the leaping, of tears
When moonly a mother moaning
‘gainst terror's high pitch to
waken in sweat and serenity (surprise)
While our axial planet's being (like
a lollipop) stupefies stupids: there’s
one mother only and only one womb
That we are one in rotation and
we are beautiful (yes) until finally
tossed into memory where dreams live
wild with confidence they cannot be
explored like jungle or reef
When mother, woman, any who opt, live
out our lives, our private infinities
*
Herediment
by Nicole Stefanko-Fuentes
She wrings the necks of songbirds
that made the little one cry & upon seeing the field littered with dead birds
who croaked
not a song
he can not be consoled, so she cuts down the branches of all the nearby trees so songbirds could not nest there
and she pierces the flanks of the spotted fawns too soft and too far out of his reach to touch
(Salvaging arrows he was proud to have made himself, before he killed the first bird and changed.)
She shutters the windows against nights without stars and tears her at her breast and curses when he continues to feel and continues to grow. Lilacs call to him about the smell of girls. A nag is for riding away.
These are figures living in tapestries and friezes
that muffle all sound but the conflict they stumble toward
whose thousands of stitches and etchings cannot fathom a whole. Drama queens to cut one's teeth on.
Not the kind of people who small talk at the counter and in waiting rooms
whose own losses don't tear their private sky from their frames, whose counter intuitions don't wrench the world off its axis, stripping the screws.
People whose eyes can still see and reflect both inward and out. I see. Not all or nothing but something. Positive space.
Not without sin or disease but with outcomes unknown. It was nice talking with you today.
to cure myself of scorn and its twin shame as if a walking oath inscribed at birth may act as guidance with its secret middle alert for all intuitions of happiness all letters from the dead and their attendant retrievals from the dead places embodied presently my grammys curly hand beside the old molds of the new waxen bee-caves my yellowflower housewife dress, buttercup moon, married to a certain time and place that flooded as now this floods again our waterways through cities of my ancestry nice bird such a nice nice bird a spider takes my arm as bridges the hills and the gardens of the city i grew in the stakes of each turning point the kind release of fear dappling through songs and their sweet singer photographing a seashell crown in a flat yard near the bay these empty perfumes hard on me and easy these empty perfumes we lent our imaginations to when lonely we gravitated the stars like freckles the skies in tune such faces such faces and alms my correspondents my curious sirs comeuppance and nostalgia brick a brack the holdings of my aunts house once my grandparents aqua-net drawers of makeup and secret poems of sports and death the angels jitterbug across the sky and when we can we do release them to cure myself a walking oath inscribed at birth may act as guidance paramour all intuitions letters from the dead the waxen ancestry dappling through songs seashell crowns crowns of pipecleaner and of yarn in which, poppy moon, continue
my daughters on their swings at twilight the mercy and the dreams a bird a spider my new striped dress thrifting with my babies every little thing she does is magic on this floody sphere married to a seashell crown the kind release these empty perfumes super aqua sweet singer the waxen bee-caves bridges hills we navigate time and space as if a walking oath its secret middle through cities crimson and pewter and lead
the girls pour chocolate into their relatives graves
The other day I invited friends on facebook to write poems called Gloria for a napowrimo prompt ... and they did! I am planning to continue doing occasional flash anthologies this way and posting them here. Thanks to the poets!
The cow bell pressed down
the timber of the guirra
my lady of Puerto Rico the most
self certain mother of Caparra
Swim Team mother of one
Ricky, a good swimmer, her low arid voice
the certain banter with my mom
her dark short curls
the brow shaped to a focused arch
turning on occasion
to clarify a phrase my six year old brain
lost keys in hand sunglasses on
a busy sitter
or was that my own mother
in bleachers
waiting for the big kids
the little ones in tow
Gloria
no nonsense cheerleader of
the untamed wifery of child into college
of love and practicality
a guttural laugh
All hail Gloria
*
Gloria
by Melissa Eleftherion Carr
To you in the highest
Comestible sunset
A celestial body outlaw
Close enough to dump material
on that other star
Mad math of the prism
Mother of light
Helios – mouth of the annelid
Of invertebrate starts
Maw of the under beyond
Pineal subways, circulatory systems, sudden moon phases
Pumping vessels flowering ganglia
We miss you
& you are still here
Your slippery hair
and some of us still always
entangling in familiar tethers
Forget it. No Paycheck Fairness Act,
no ERA
the India, Stubenville, Egypt
Then India
Maybe it's the labored last failing grasp
of a falling empire
or
how to teach a girl to run with her long
handled knife concealed
They think when it's men it's a war
and when it's us
it's hunting
On the train a schoolgirl draws hearts
on a boy's cheeks
with a ballpoint pen
One under his earlobe
like a hickey
Gloria, I will carve a heart on the lobe
that grows this predatory madness
*
Gloria
by Elizabeth Treadwell
I might become a nun if I could find the right order but even preceding and during the saying I know I must build my own here in the crux of it the trivia the madame x clubhouse of a scratchy yellow field in 1977 the vickies portlandia all those jessamy brides of 1987 with their hair dancing to slack, beautybels, o the seas the seas hugged by their highways the untended tenders of 1997, paloma, my dearest dearest sirs, figurative language & nicorette, 2007, my children tie me to the earth as I once longed for them to, anchoret, present daylight, stardark, and rain.
the iterations of the sea, sweet betty
the earth flown through by tiny lacies
flooding the sea muse and the sky muse
and the dear thick earth, we love you brightly
in any sun, each star and trestle how the mighty mini
made things such as towns of clay and sand in spurts and flutters,
the foamy blankets of the shores the gently unknowns
and the winds, sweet betty, the iterations of the sea
for Sarah Schubart, in memory, on her 45th birthday
[I was tagged by Susana Gardner. Bc the world’s spinning so quickly now 5 years ago is vintage.]
THE NEXT BIG THING
What is the working title of the book?
It’s called Virginia or the mud-flap girl but at times was also Shell keep., Ancient Celebrity Tune-rot, and fleece pimsy.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
My interest in the true histories of our continent (North America); mythology; feminism or the female line; and of course, celebrity and royalty. A long-abiding interest in Pocahontas and in Elizabeth I, real women whose lives were so powerful as to be on the level of myth.
What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry and history.
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
I love this question, but they are already playing themselves throughout and it’s already a film – the names of celebs are the titles of a lot of the poems in the first section – Uma Thurman & so on. Here though, is a fun star map…this is from a play I wrote ten years ago, La Gnossienne, with Dana Teen Lomax as Aphra Behn; Yedda Morrison as Djuna Barnes; Carol Treadwell as Jean Rhys; and Sarah Anne Cox (pregnant with Phaedra Cox-Farr) as Gertrude Stein (note her little dog too). Bc it's all one project in the end.
One of the best things Sarah Anne Cox ever said was that watching Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris was like playing with Barbies. It was enjoyable but the guy has absolutely no sense of Gertrude Stein or Djuna Barnes, sorry. I’m waiting for Hollywood to step up to the plate with biopics showcasing the glamour (in the archaic as well as contemporary senses of the word) of actual women writers and adaptations of the works of women. Where is the James Franco version of Audre Lorde’s life? Bc really the male Beats can go home by now with their gap ad selves. Where are the vast screen adaptations of Eliza Haywood’s works? Etc. It’s a disservice to the women who made that place, for example the great genius Anita Loos. It’s a loss for us all, and it is no accident, it’s the suppression of the voices of so many. It’s no fun either!
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
5 years, plus all the time I had to think and learn before that.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Toni Morrison, Paula Gunn Allen, Barack Obama. My fellow Americans ☺. Vine Deloria Jr.’s quote: “We should be making a determined effort to move forward in the creation of a continental culture that understands itself as a totality and a novelty whose only concern is developing forms of existence that provide everyone involved with a sense of integrity and identity.”
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
It’s gossipy!
Who is publishing your book?
Dusie Books put it out last year. It’s my second book with Dusie.
Hi this is the text I read for Delirious Hem today....these poems will all fit together as Virginia or the mud-flap girl, to be published by Dusie next year. Some of them are already out in a new chapbook from Least Weasel. Others from the project are here and there. Xo, Eliz.
the fairly cwen
the olden seas sweet edges far from the stormy lullabies that set the stagy notion in the park inside the park tracing loves earthy footpath the tender animalia the cozy repeating bits in hearth and glen where mother wasn’t lonely stylized forests did the first cwens in such water castle our songs of comfort & praise
*
Kirstie Alley
the aging sugar scratch tucked as bad as if such brittle donations in the clearinghouse as if tubby the wicked on other days while thinking thin while carrying the wish-bones and the fretted land-haul tucked as bad as if offerings a painful cutting down in some time else such uncozy tolerance the other guy’s polite surprise at the irregular hands of the pharm the rubber-cheeked debate all the mary parts so drab & eerie in that distant shag carpet basin of angles all the mall-bearing marigolds and all the tiny hollows of ourselves untouched by disney raised in sorrow gently raised in joy those other days behind us
*
Reese Witherspoon
the damp fixings of the internet the stars and the stripes of my own private mumblecock the fake relevance of the avant-garde the crap manliness of the same its keen imperialism, Reese Witherspoon, the false attachments of the scene
*
Michelle Williams
all the handsome signifiers in the village heap
so much falls to the mother they are not gods
the heavy busy lace prevention of empires
*
toward the doggy wood
in the ritual pit toward the doggy wood shell keep.
*
the platinum herd already texting these new world
*
Mispretend this fatal document, my senator, my namesake, my urn
She draws charms, glitter, the tooth-strewn scar
roots from the world a shabby cult in browny nightcap
in the costume-hell shrew melody grand name-bearing quality apt repose
the self's heavy architecture acing the wonder quiz linger in the orchard now make your head small in unreachable furniture draw the unknowable lines of little artists your hairy nar nar your mouths & skins
