******************** Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades, as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, … Continue reading »
******************** Deepwater Horizon: One Year Later “Auger” takes its title from Shell’s first deepwater play in the Gulf of Mexico (in partnership with BP)—drilling in 2,860 feet of water to a depth of 19,360 feet—in the mid-1990s. (With Deepwater Horizon, BP ultimately would drill in 4,000 feet of water to a depth of 35,055 … Continue reading »
For Dangerfield Newby, Freedman This is for Dangerfield Newby, lying quiet amid the muskets and white men in the fire house in Harper’s Ferry, waiting. This is for Dangerfield Newby, and all those men whose families worked some other farm, waiting to be sold, waiting for the carts and whips to take them south. This … Continue reading »
– From The ms of m y kin (Shearsman, 2009) ******************** Janet Holmes is author of The ms of m y kin (Shearsman, 2009), F2f (U of Notre Dame, 2006), Humanophone (U of Notre Dame, 2001), The Green Tuxedo (U of Notre Dame, 1998), and The Physicist at the Mall (Anhinga, 1994). Her work has … Continue reading »
Autumn Beach It’s Black Friday, and we’re miles from any mall, where Capitalism will trample whoever opens doors at the Wal-Mart at six in the morning. Evening, waves tumble ashore to the echo of Thanksgiving, tossing billions of dead bivalves over the island sand. Promised rains never came and, as night falls—unfolds its Orion, Cassiopeia, … Continue reading »
***** ******************** The following interview too place via email in April 2011 between Heidi Lynn Staples and Michael Rothenberg: HLS: What is the 100,000 Poets for Change initiative? MR: 100 Thousand Poets for Change is a global action of poets and artists scheduled to take place on September 24. So far we have 70 … Continue reading »
Safe House http://knstrct.com/2011/04/10/the-safe-house/ Hello there. Welcome to my safe house. Here you will find numerous porcelain Afghanistans. In the safe house safe there are coins cut the shape of Malawi. In the study where I wish you to relax please find a number of wood carvings of John Lennon & Sons. The lampshades are German. … Continue reading »
Call It Accident Call it midnight thump and boom. Gumbo lockdown. Call up gush; swirl and spread. Forward moving call it stalled. Call a party, crown petroleum queen. On call the creeping, race for land. Call it caught drifting in a starless sea. Long-billed or swell-bellied, sway in the bilge. Call it quits—trolled, talked-down. Roll … Continue reading »
blessing for the water beginning no end circle the earth blesséd water blood of life ~~~~~~~~~~ STATEMENT This is the text of a public art installation at the Brightwater Treatment Plant in King County, Washington. Jane Tsong is the visual artist, who proposed making three “blessings” for the water treatment plant: for water, air … Continue reading »
May 21 She spent the morning reading Mrs. Dalloway, flinching at Rezia’s extreme solitude in a strange city with a strange language and Septimus Smith her only friend. For she had left the comfort of home, left Italy with a husband she hardly knew, a man who spoke to the unseen. And Diana felt Rezia’s … Continue reading »
SCIENCE FICTION Just now I touched my chest And felt my heart quivering there. This must be one of the bad times. I think it is quivering with remorse And exhaustion. Once I saw a heart Beating in a documentary. I was a very Little girl and the sight disgusted me. Throbbing and not stopping … Continue reading »
~~~~~~~~~~~~ For more information on Ghen Dennis , click here. Continue reading »
flare -April 19th, 2010 an old man walked from the barbecue area of the Beachview Resort Hotel to the water he concentrated past the obstacle of children who stole shells from under his foot or traced borderlines in the sand with gull feathers plump lovers bounded ahead with some float device at last he reached … Continue reading »
Progress Report Tar balls appear thirty miles from my from my front door. In the early morning and near dusk, the perfume of pines–even the familiar rot of Louisiana summer– are vanquished by the smell of oil. After so many dispersant-soaked red eye mornings, after so many cracked pelican eggs and broken promises, after … Continue reading »
The Day We Added Ecocide To Our Vocabulary No longer constrained to the lexicon of activists and free thinkers, the word spilled onto the barren shores of our lips. No longer content to bomb cities, blockade countries, or tell indigenous peoples theirs is only an imagined community, the guilt of our disaster attacks an entire … Continue reading »
That’s What I Am! Bonfire builders from way down the river, These are my people. The proud son of a Mardi Gras queen And the festival king – that’s what I am! I know I’m home When I see the cypress peekin’ out From the low-hanging fog. Seafood boiled, spiced and crimson Against the green … Continue reading »
Daughters of the deluge black mermaids face disaster 1. Oil stains our blood mothers we are not clean, our scales singe red the chains are chemicals they form rings around our wrists, we cry to the bones that gave us life the bones disintegrate the new ships are steel the only bodies that drop- our … Continue reading »
properties of limestone On broken bicycle spokes, our guide pokes at mosquito bites bathed in horse shit, speaks of luck like the octopus who picked world cup winners Oohing at all the appropriate flora, we have more or less adapted to the cacti the stray dogs so skinny they masticate the spines, a hunger running … Continue reading »
The View from Cedar Key There are acts we shouldn’t risk, the way we’d not send our children across busy streets alone. Perhaps nothing of ours would slick the Gulf, no black goo coat the feathers of staggering birds, nothing clot the sand our toddlers love to mound. Perhaps we’ll never wake to brown beaches. … Continue reading »
Blue “How do I now determine that a surface … has this colour?*“ – Ludwig Wittgenstein (for P.D.) I am just a woman on a beach watching blue-evening fishermen set up shadow poles I am just the sound of blue water hitting stones in a time approaching transparent I am just a tract of blue … Continue reading »
We Dreamt of a City of Mirrors It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of … Continue reading »
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Laura Fenwick lives in Austin, TX. This is her first published poem. Continue reading »
Firewater My river. A friend’s ocean. Each oil-mucked, each has burned. Cuyahoga, the Iroquois word for crooked, has come to mean it, too, burns. Gulf, hard, hollow Germanic, may maintain its meaning but gain context to what it is that’s missing – vibrancy in algae, flushes of oxygen from the sea. Meanings, though, are not … Continue reading »
On Noticing the Gulf Breeze at Grande Isle for the First Time as a Small Child I was the smallest frilly put to nap at noon in the high cotton bed at Lointaine’s camp. I could hear the women in their lawn chairs below the pilings peeling crabs and talking French, when a daydream thick … Continue reading »
poem outside the cyclone fence surrounding the space i call home havoc-happenstance horrific predictions (the end is near, again!) but here in the Cicada’s drone- a long, dry, hum a rhythmic, Shaman’s rattle speaks: take off your shoes bare your feet put your back down let the earth’s spine silence your mind … Continue reading »
Incantation for Our Mother Mother, we knew the caress of your deep currents before we grew feathers and took wing. We knew the rock and lullaby of your waves before we grew legs and tottered out from between your sunkissed limbs onto the shore. Mother, we knew the salty sustenance of your body, the irresistible … Continue reading »
DEEPWATER HORIZON Take a deep breath, I say to myself, then remember the petroleum wind, the spreading slick, rig workers blasted and sent to bones and wreckage in the Gulf now gushing plumes of wealth. The wellhead swells and looses filth. Each tide is slick with thick, sweet crude which etches delicate marshes and blends … Continue reading »
Big Blank Page for Marine Life The rule book says not to care if they live or die. If a woman screams the word dizzy loud enough her mind-well disengages. If a man believes he is God then he is the founder of organized crime. Religion is a jellyfish sting in the eye. Only … Continue reading »
EVERYBODY COOL IT right now as we are in the moment of destroying all life as we know it beginning with the largest & most terrifying animals— wolves lions buffalo etc., lately I read pollinators also—hummingbirds bats & bees, traded for scary architecture, stopsigns SUVs roll thru, the shopping cart that homeless guy pushes allegorizing … Continue reading »
According to the Drunken Elders of my Past When you like a girl you tuck your shirt in. Buy beer cheap as possible. When the flood came you slept like a baby in our skiff, and the moon was a rabid dog eating raindrops from your face. A paddle works in most fights. A shirt … Continue reading »
Symbiosis The Hawaiian bobtail squid forages in the night surf while waves of moonlight, of starlight fall like sediment into the sea. Its globular eyes pulse green; its spotted body glows orange, brown and blue. Smaller than my thumb, it is a galaxy, an organ of light inhabited by millions of luminescent bacteria. In the … Continue reading »
The River, Once once she went to quench then she went to scrub now she collects dead toads grinds them with cornmeal to feed her sows once she ploughed the land toiled with her face deep in dark soil her back burning in hot sun now she works in the paper mill making laminated labels … Continue reading »
Lines Written under Thirteen Thousand Pounds per Square Inch Deepwater Horizon Spill The ink from within has plumed through mile deep water, festoons the reeds and fishes, turtles and birds with iridescent pearls of smotheration. Under such force a single tentacle of ink escapes the gravity of glued pelicans to narrate the tale of the … Continue reading »
Status Quo “After” the Gulf Incident for JoAnn Now that the estuary is a well-oiled machine, ball bearings in the slippery, every blade a dipstick, the Government and the BP’s and the Halliburtons can breed plants down there, import workers, who will care how much it all stinks. Just think: rampant oil could be a … Continue reading »
Please click below to listen: hustle+blow_mp3 STATEMENT Poet Brett Evans lives in the Bayou St. John neighborhood of New Orleans. This bayou, which runs into the middle of the city, is home to nutrias, pelicans, and flying fish, and was a Native American trail and portage. New Orleans is made of water. Its streets are … Continue reading »
AGROUND The slick would engulf the conscious coastline into disorder, facing a wintry sea the estuary braced against nature’s principles, the prescriptive balance threatened by a stench like genocide, the malevolence of human actions, mute dollops on a treasure of sands; the praised mythology of dolphins, the guillemots, cormorants, grey seals aground, their character despoiled … Continue reading »
Please click below to listen: This Poem is for You – Megan Roth ~~~~~~~~~~ Megan Roth is a poet in Miami Florida and author of The Green Guide to Daily Living. She recieved her MFA from the University of Miami, and has published work in Opium, POEM, and Elimae. Her website is http://www.mrothillustration.com. Continue reading »
Louisiana Swamp Poem –for the Atchafalaya, for Greg Guirard 1 Your swamp’s not my swamp, he says, by which he means a New Orleans swamp’s not the same as a Cajun’s, that the way I sometimes use swamp as metaphor for all that’s family-dark is not what he sees when he looks into the waters … Continue reading »
SIX AQUATIC GODDESSES OFFER THEIR NOTES ON THE NEW CENTURY ZÉMYNÁ AND IX CHEL When she crosses the dunes, she leaves holes instead of footprints. Standing hip deep in the Gulf, her thin limbs don’t disturb the waves. She is young and her gut is strong but the gulls die around her with a flap of black … Continue reading »
Window cleaning The scaffolding crashed, a balsa wood plane, missed Marco’s coffee stand by inches – I‘m swinging over the steel and toughened glass canyon by a thread. Safe. Tied to the roof in case today happened. An acrobat spinning by the teeth and a strop of leather at the top of a circus tent … Continue reading »
Gaza waterprayer –after Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.” Dear human body, You do not have to be good or bad. You do not have to pray angelic, veil each thousandth tide this dying body. You only have to let each shrivel loosen and tell what it tells: fire from the air, fire from the sea. Love … Continue reading »
Yellow Wave Yellow ocean wave cresting at the sand cresting toward the reeds in mid-crest yellow and speckled with dark globules of the board meeting thick black spheres of the dividend pretty yellow ocean out of whom come bottlenose baby corpses beleaguered brown pelican [angry and slick!!!] credit card numbers one single hard hat hard … Continue reading »
Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and Darker Minds This poem is not about the cosmos And the dim ideas some have Concerning a consciousness Responsible for it all. This poem is about the oil (glug glug) currently spilling Into the Gulf of Mexico Out of a pipe Some greedy capitalists erected To give themselves more money … Continue reading »
~~~~~~~~~~ STATEMENT These pieces come from a work in progress called Exit 43, conceived of as an archaeology of the Superfundament and opera of pop-up choruses—a response to the fallout of industry in localized bodies, including those of my family and neighbors, present and past. These particular “pop-ups” were written not in the wake of … Continue reading »
Evidence Start today as always. Time is matter. Pluck, stitch. Threads of moment a darling addiction. Collects in the wisdom of the oceans. Evidence is crude & wide. Watch & watch more. No time for complacency. Weeping is not sufficient. Let’s learn something here. Now. Dammit!, let’s at least learn. ~~~~~~~~~~ STATEMENT It’s so much … Continue reading »
photographs glossy and smudged a whole city’s smog-dust on my desk must have something to do with it I think I’m supposed to say something about all this how about: I exist and this sea turtle does not like oil under her shell an airplane is landing at the edge of sky … Continue reading »
I The Greyhound bus station was the jail just cages and cops and rude soldiers I talked to old men who got beat and young men who got beat then I drove a woman home who just got out of prison she called me handsome but my throat hurt after the hurricane in New Orleans … Continue reading »
Loggerhead Caretta caretta Loggerhead: originally an insult applied to people, later a kind of cannon shot, the post on a whaleboat anchoring the harpoon line, a bulbous-headed iron tool used to heat tar & the largest sea turtle in the world. Its jaws can crunch through the thickest armor: queen conch, giant clam. Like all sea … Continue reading »
Natural Disaster Always have to wonder: Was it the water, or was it the wall? The story always makes me wonder: Was it the wave, or the breaking of the wall. Which was the natural part of disaster Flooding the city, after all? Makes me think twice: Is it the oil, or is it the … Continue reading »
STATEMENT I grew up swimming every summer in the Gulf of Mexico. It was an escape from the land-locked center of Texas, where I was raised in a small farming community. The farmland, which seemed to be not just on the outskirts of the town, but also under one’s feet, was considered extraordinarily well fit … Continue reading »
