********************

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, and in the Beat, New York School and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. Yet she remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Her work is energetic, passionate, panoramic, fierce at times. She is the author of more than 40 books, including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman, a collection of essays entitled Vow to Poetry and several selected poems editions including Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure and In the Room of Never Grieve. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble, Manatee/Humanity which is a book-length rhizomic meditation on evolution and endangered species, and the monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment.

She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church In-the-Bowery, working there for twelve years. She also co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired University in the western hemisphere, in 1974. Ginsberg has called Waldman his “spiritual wife”. She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics at Naropa and continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary/oral archive She has edited and co-edited many collections based on the holdings of the Kerouac School including, Civil Disobediences and Beats at Naropa. She is also the editor of Nice to See You, an homage to poet Ted Berrigan, The Beat Book, and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology.

She has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, and has held the Emily Harvey residency in Venice. She has worked at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and at the Women’s Christian College in Tokyo, She has presented her work at conferences and festivals around the world, most recently in Beijing, Berlin. Nicaragua, Prague, Kerala, Mumbai, Calcutta, Marrakech, and Madrid. Her work has been translated into numerous languages.

Waldman works with the anti-nuclear Guardianship Project in Boulder and was arrested in the 1970s with Allen Ginsberg and activist Daniel Ellsberg at Rocky Flats which led to a commitment to the accountability for nuclear waste to future generations, a vow that according to Waldman is “a nearly quarter of a million year project”

“Waldman’s work is the antithesis of stasis…She is a flame. ” as one reviewer has noted.

She has also collaborated extensively with a number of artists, musicians, and dancers, including George Schneeman, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis, and Pat Steir , and the theatre director Judith Malina. Her play “Red Noir” was produced by the Living Theatre and ran for nearly three months in New York City in 2010. She has also been working most recently with other media including audio, film and video, with her husband, writer and video/film director Ed Bowes, and with her son, musician and composer Ambrose Bye. Publishers Weekly recently referred to Waldman as “a counter-cultural giant”.

Waldman is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Her latest book is The Iovis Trilogy, Coffee House 2011. She divides her time between New York City and Boulder, Colorado.

********************

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 feet.  As I write, new wells are being readied in the ultra-deepwater.)  The first image, from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Report to the President, shows a scale rendering of the tension-leg drilling platform used at Auger, superimposed over the city of New Orleans.

Auger: “a large tool for boring holes deep in the ground.”

Superimposing a transparency of the scale platform image on the poem, I bored a hole through the “Great Ocean” sequence of Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, as translated by Howard Schwartz – taking out a half inch right down the middle of each page. The words I had bored became the poem, “Auger.” Estimated at about 1,300 lines, the poem when assembled stretches 26 feet across my floor, a .13 to 100 scale rendering of the Augur well.  

In drilling Neruda, I hoped to hit pay at a certain depth.  I am still trying to understand what it means to drill through that much water, that deep in the ground.  I wanted to experience the pressure of the long poem, in a compressed period.  And to communicate scale.

When I meet with Representative Chellie Pingree, to discuss Representative Ed Markey’s bill, HR 501: Implementing the Recommendations of the BP Oil Spill Commission Act, I’d like to read her a bit of “Augur.”  I also want to thank her for the House Sustainability Coalition, which she founded and chairs.  And I hope to entrust her with a bit of human scale.  

You can find the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Report here: http://www.oilspillcommission.gov/final-report

The report is good reading—even if you think you know everything about the so-called “spill.”  You don’t.  It is as interesting for what it doesn’t say as for what it does.

I do not think of poetry as a tool for persuasion; I do think of it as an instrument of dialogue.  Earlier this year, I invited other poets and artists to join me in reading the Presidential Commission’s report, and in attempting to meet with their representative, to share some poetry or art—as a way to break silence on Markey’s proposed legislation, implementing the recommendations of the report.  (If we cannot stop deepwater drilling, let us at least make it regulated.) 

I asked for documentation of the experiment, including failures as much as success.  36 contributors sent 130 pages of astonishing, thought-provoking material—essays, poems, dialogues, field reports, photoworks, digital art—which I have edited, as my contribution to the forthcoming issue of Interim Magazine.  (I’ll also present Rep. Pingree with a copy of this work.)  A personal visit, they say, is worth a thousand letters, a poem worth a thousand pictures. 

A poem is also for remembering.  If not for yourself, then for the Common yellowthroat.

20 April, 2011

*****

*********************

Jonathan Skinner founded and edits the journal ecopoetics (www.ecopoetics.org). Skinner also writes ecocriticism on contemporary poetry and poetics. Skinner’s poetry collections include Birds of Tifft (BlazeVox, 2011), Warblers (Albion Books, 2010), With Naked Foot (Little Scratch Pad Press, 2009), and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). He teaches Environmental Studies at Bates College.

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 is for Dangerfield Newby
who would not wait, who chose the gun and John Brown
and the town we know with its high vise of cliffs and beauty.

We do not know Dangerfield Newby.
So this is for him, who loved and hated and could no longer wait
and so chose the gun. For Dangerfield Newby, who was the first
man dragged from the fire house in 1859 and shot through the throat.
The volunteers beat his still body in the dust,
slipped their knives from sheaves at their waists
and sliced the offending ears from his broken body.

This is for the ears of Dangerfield Newby.
They had heard possibility – to lie again beside
a woman whose name we do not know,
a woman who could not choose.
This is for the ears of Dangerfield Newby
that heard an echo from those blue hills,
from the shallow whisperings of the two rivers.
Lying in the separate pockets of white men –
on two tables at the tavern –
even on display in the separate homes of white men –
the ears of Dangerfield Newby each heard a single word, freedom.

*****

GOVERNOR BRADFORD WATCHES THE INDIANS FALL INTO LAMENTABLE CONDITION, 1633

In the swamp spring of Plymouth,
Essex, Narragansett Bay,
the Indians, dying on hard mats,
miss the rush of mackerel
into nets. The mackerel make
their way unhindered
and the Indians go hungry.

The pox loves hunger, seeks it
like the hunter, quiet
in the woods that no one
burned last year, too busy
were the Indians being fearful
to behold, their skin flaying
and cleaving by reason thereof
to the mats they lie on.

The pox is traded to the next
village and the next, the way
in the past the Wampanoag
traded corn for animal skins
with the Abenaki to the north,
so there is no warmth this winter
and the Indians lie down to die
like rotten sheep.

Which is how the Lord
cleared the land,
bleached it pure, the pox breaking
and mattering and running one
into another, seeking brethren
in the body of these lamentable
creatures – all of a gore blood –
who cry out to be taken,
at last, their final call to the earth.

Note: Quotations in the poem are from William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation.

********************

RECENT ACTIONS
Split This Rock has its origins in DC Poets Against the War, a group I founded as part of the international movement against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. After several years of powerful local organizing we began calling poets from around the country to DC to march together in the major national anti-war demonstrations. The response was tremendous. Poets clearly were moved to come to our nation’s capital and speak out together through the prophetic language of poetry.

I had always dreamed of an organizational home that would welcome both my poet self and my activist self. I was lucky to land in DC, where such a community has thrived for decades. As the wars dragged on and our country seemed to us to move further and further away from its founding principles of equality and social justice, in 2007 we decided that the time had come to take our organizing up a notch.

We spent a long time dreaming up the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival – its shape, its name, the timing, the hook, how we’d fund it, how we’d staff it, whether we could pull it off… But pull it off we did. On the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq in March 2008 hundreds of socially engaged poets gathered in DC for a transformative hybrid event: part festival, part conference, part celebration, part demonstration. It was such a smash success that we decided to incorporate and make the festival a regular part of the literary and activist landscape. We hope you’ll join us as we bring poetry into the center of public life, where it belongs! www.SplitThisRock.org

********************

Sarah Browning is the coeditor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology and coordinator of the group of the same name, which has been active since the first national day of poetry against the war, February 12, 2003. She helped produce Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in March 2008. Her first book of poems, Whiskey in the Garden of Eden, was published by The Word Works in 2007, and she hosts Sunday Kind of Love at Busboys and Poets DC. In 2005, Browning received a D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities Individual Artist Grant and the People Before Profits Poetry Prize.

– 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 twice been included in the annual Best American Poetry anthologies, and she has received numerous prizes and honors for her writing, including grants from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The Idaho Arts Commission, and The Loft. Her recent work appears in 1913, Cutbank, Gutcult, MiPoesias, and Practice. She is director of Ahsahta Press, an all-poetry publishing house at Boise State University, where she has taught in the MFA program since 1999.

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, its Seven
Sisters—twinkling stars eons dead—
it’s Mumbai on T.V., it’s the Taj,

the Oberoi, blood on the stairs and
searching room to room,
but not our room, where the only red

is your skin echoing
the rumble of a sauna tub
and, lying with door open,

your warm mouth echoes the pounding
of the Gulf.

********************

RECENT ACTIONS
I had this idea to do a collaborative protest/civil-disobedience project (in the form of a chapbook) to send to Gulf-state politicians. Originally, it was going to be just a couple of us but, as it started to take shape, Jay (Snodgrass) and I invited others to participate. The resulting collection is really stunning and a nice cross-section of poetic voices.

The final work is called Conquistadors of the Imagination and includes poetry by Denise Duhamel, Michael Rothenberg, Sharon Mesmer, Elisabeth Workman, Christine Poreba, and more. After the initial copies go out to our “target” audience, we’ll make some available for sale, with proceeds going to Save Our Shores.

********************

Scott Sweeney is the editor/publisher of Grey Book Press, producing chapbooks and journals (most recently Momoware). He has published poetry in a number of small press journals and independent webzines. Scott lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife and daughter and two Siamese cats. While he doesn’t really enjoy the beach, he has a profound appreciation for nature and the sanctity of our Gulf Coast ecosystem.

*****

********************

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 cities representing 15 countries organizing events. The idea is that each city, or group of individuals within a city, will have a poetry related event with a focus on “change”, and this should be the change of their choice, not a change dictated by an official organization or the main office. So this event is a global concept but dependent on local vision and initiative. I suggest that peace and sustainability could be “change” guidelines, but local needs are very specific. And the only other thing that I am asking in the design of the local event is that a part of the event, even if it is only ten minutes, will take place outdoors. Of course if an outdoor event is not possible then that’s okay too. After September I am inviting participants to send us documentation, poems, photos, and a “statement of change” from their event participants and I will post this on a 100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE blog.

HLS: What sort of change do you envision?

MR: The first level of change I envision is that poets around the world will show solidarity. That is a big change. I feel that poets have become alienated from each other, in many ways, by locale, aesthetic politics, language, class bias, race bias, and that we have squandered our voice as a community. I wonder how we can even think of changing the world if we can’t change the way we relate to each other as poets and artists. I know there is a debate that goes on from time to time about whether poetry really changes anything and I don’t really feel the need to get involved in that debate. Poets can change things. If they can gather in trade conventions and discuss curriculum and publishing then they can also get together and discuss how business is being done in their community, address inequality, racism, war, health care, education, etc. Poets are competent beyond discussions of tenure and publication. So beyond the initial change that will take place because poets will get together across various boundaries and barriers, there are broader change issues they can address.

HLS: Poetry is marginalized in U.S. consciousness and culture. How do you see marginalization in relation to a need for a wide-scale shift in consciousness?

MR: The first step to changing the way people see poetry in culture is that poets need to change how they see themselves. As long as they feel ineffective, view themselves as marginal actors and thinkers in the world, they will be perceived as ineffectual by others. Poets need to leave their hideouts, their garrets, classrooms, literary experiments, books, and take action. I am very impressed by one poet in Wisconsin who ran for State Assembly.

HLS: How did you get started editing Big Bridge?

MR: I became dissatisfied with the way literary magazines did business. I didn’t like the long waits for submission responses. I thought that the poetics and aesthetic judgments of the established literary journals stifled creativity, were narrow in their understanding of poetic individuality, original and unique expression and voice. The internet was inspiring because it opened things up. It allowed new communities of creativity to flourish. I liked the idea of having the world at your fingertips too, to speak with other poets and exchange creative work by e-mail, rapidly and regardless of sanctions from entrenched art bullies. I liked the multi-media aspect of the internet as well. As artists we were promised a future of multi-media art, and although the mainstream publishers have not addressed that promise very well, the internet has. I liked the fact that I could put a literary magazine together, with multi-media features, without spending tons of dollars on printing and distribution headaches. You could make a literary journal on your own, at home, samizdat. The first issue of Big Bridge went up in 1997. I had just returned to California after working as a songwriter in Nashville, TN and had seen how “industry” and “establishment” in the music industry confounded creativity and broke a lot of hearts. I didn’t see why poets should succumb to the same type of monopolies, creative bad habits, that afflicted the “entertainment industry.”

HLS: How do you imagine the role of literary magazine editor in creating and sustaining culture?

MR: Big Bridge doesn’t make pretenses about “great poetry”, we don’t say what we think is GREAT poetry. We say what we find to be compelling work. What we try to do is put forward some really good poetry, work written with passion and insight, and let our readers decide what they personally think is great, if that is what they need to do. That is how I have been most comfortable functioning as an editor at Big Bridge. I am wrong too often to make foolish pronouncements about GREATNESS. Readers need to learn to make choices. Of course, I don’t publish everything that is sent to me, but I try to keep things open, to be democratic in ways, and foster creativity. That would be my role.

HLS: What does poetry mean to you? What is its significance in your life?

MR: Poetry is my illusion. I embrace it whole-heartedly. It is my idealism, and therefore my blessing and curse. It is a kind of religion where there are no gods, only beauty, humanity and vision.

HLS: How are you reading? How are they influencing your thinking in this moment?

MR: I am reading a lot of Henry Miller and Kenneth Patchen right now. I have done a lot of editorial work on Philip Whalen and will be putting out his unpublished short story, Invisible Idylls, in the next couple of months through Big Bridge Press. Whalen, Miller, Patchen keep me busy right now. I see in these writers, these artists, a grand sense of humanity and imagination that inspires and nurtures me.

HLS: What are you writing?

MR: I have just finished a first draft of an autobiographical, memoirish book called THE FAN. And working on another redraft of a novel that has been haunting me for 15 years, THE DRUMS OF GRACE. My interest in form continues, the journal-poem is always there, the breakdown and build-up of language engages me. I try to put the cart before the horse as much as possible! And certainly there is plenty of news in the world to keep me worried!

HLS: What role does writing play in your political engagement?

MR: Is there a difference between politics and poetry? I have seen some people say they keep their politics separate from their poetry. I don’t even think that makes sense in any way. It seems to be a statement of words but of very little meaning. Every act is political.

********************

Photo by Terri Carrion

Born in Miami Beach, Florida in 1951, Michael Rothenberg has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past 30 years. He is co-founder of Shelldance Orchid Gardens in Pacifica which is dedicated to the cultivation of orchids and bromeliads. He is a poet, painter, songwriter, and editor of Big Bridge Press and Big Bridge, a webzine of poetry and everything else. His most recent collection of poems is CHOOSE, Selected Poems published by Big Bridge Press, 2009. My Youth As A Train will be available from Foothills Publishing in September 2010. He is presently living in the redwoods.

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. The Persian rugs are tongue.
Kind sir, halt! Do not issue another fatwā in Farsi!
Not until you consider my landscape painting of Trebižat, that great
Bosnian river or Smith’s high realist triptych of the Tunguska event.
Hello there. It would please me to please you with
kindness upon entering my safe house door. If anything
should irradiate the staff, there are replacement menservants
ready in waiting to greet you beside the blown up photos
of gargoyles on the veranda in the cosmic burst garden.

*****

Baker’s Dozen Sci Fi Sonnet feat. Charlotte Brontë’s Dress made of an H-O Junk Bond Rating

Mon sem-blah-blah-ounce, this fission sonnet
is a dumb blonde standing on a melting Mont Blanc
junk bonded to “O, that I spent
my childhood in the Alps.” Come to think of it…
I am an Alp.
What kind of hydrogen peroxide form yells “let me out
of the Brontë house?” In Haworth, I tried on
Charlotte’s dress— my waist’s circumference
a smaller 0 than the 19th century where her energy’s stored.
Indifferent horizon! Fizzing fuzz cell hell fusion cuisine!
Bomb of was, you never were! Us girls put petroleum products
on our lips to kiss. Swiss chocolate, I think that alp
is anorexic. Atomic mass diet. Synthesis. Mon, whatever.

*****

Bikram Yoga Sonnet

I was tired because I have a two year old
so I took some NoDoz. And then my heart flipped
out and I needed to relax so I went to a yoga studio.
And it was like the world was made of awkward
pose. And then life turned Caribbean
in a head stand. And then I passed
out in underwater aqua-
marine roses and stars. I think the teacher said “plank”
which meant I was a pirate in colorful
spandex with a nose ring and booty
or maybe it meant that the world was ending
and soon I would become very flexible.
I hope no one here is concerned. The teacher said
some poses take a lifetime to learn.

*********************

RECENT ACTIONS
I am organizing an Atlanta 100 Thousand Poets for Change event in September

*********************

Sandra Simonds grew up in Los Angeles, California. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and Creative Writing at U.C.L.A and an M.F.A. from the University of Montana, where she received a poetry fellowship. In 2010, she earned a PhD in Literature from Florida State University. She is currently finishing a second full-length collection of poems called Mother was a Tragic Girl. She is the author of Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008), which was a finalist for numerous prizes including the National Poetry Series; she is also the author of several chapbooks including Used White Wife (Grey Book Press, 2009) and The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington, Written from Land & Sea (Cy Gist, 2006). Her poems have been published in many journals including Poetry, The Believer, the Colorado Review, Fence, the Columbia Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Volt, the New Orleans Review and Lana Turner. Her Creative Nonfiction has been published in Post Road and other literary journals. She currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an Assistant Professor of English at Thomas University in beautiful, rural Southern Georgia.

scattered to the Kansas plains’
red wheat. Out West,
souls every day were shedding
their Earthly inheritance—the refused

histories of cause and effect,
blight, hunger with a trace
of Santa Fe Railway coal
dusting grocers’ displays—

and so my grandfather, too,
who, having left Topeka
for Los Angeles’s early sprawl,
exits the train station’s dim

into day’s white flash,
takes one step onto his upturned
apple crate, a new Bible
in his palm, and he begins

to explain why all things are fire,
what it is that makes you ache
awake, and why this must
be so. Once, on a gritty

city beach in California—flies,
stinking strands of kelp
rotting, Styrofoam—he
and I sat watching a gull choir

first eyeball, then swoop,
then peck, almost in unison,
something tangled in a blue tarp
washed-in above the tide-pull.

A drowning victim, maybe.
A vagrant. And though unable
to see what was there, when he
put his hand in mine

I could not have even counted
all the things I wished
to believe in, and which would still
be true if what I remembered

was the sound of the waves landing,
but now there is only the lungless
hot breath of L.A.
on my cheek, the cries of gulls,

their wings ruffling into flight.
The night after his memorial,
someone dug a hole into
Kansas silt loam, dropped

into it the plastic baggie
with his ashen remains.
Nothing then but distance in every
direction. Above us, a satellite’s

beacon begged the horizon
for home, the heavens’ scales
measured the darkness, and that’s all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joshua Robbins is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Tennessee where he teaches poetry and fiction writing, and serves as Editor for Grist: The Journal for Writers. His awards include the James Wright Poetry Award, the New South Prize, as well as multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. His work appears in Best New Poets, Mid-American Review, Third Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Verse Daily, Copper Nickel, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

“‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said.”

How many inscrutable angels does it take to screw in
a lightbulb? None.

How many mice?
Two, but there’s not much room.

Two of Ma’s favorite expressions:
“It smelled like low tide at Coney Island.”
“She looked like the last whore at the clambake.”

One of Dad’s expressions:
“Your ass is grass.”
Jump the fence, Johnson grass can cut your feet.

Pisser clams seem nonplussed by my poems,
I’m volatile as a quahog in public.

I’m quiet at home too.
We eat, and are grateful.

Night, my head hits the pillow.
Night, I pray my gratitude
and a little fluid leaks out of my left ear,
relieving the pain. Lilac. Saguaro. Dandelion.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I have a couple books people might be able to find in used bookstores, THE ISLAND ITSELF and HOMESICK. I have a third book coming out in April of 2012, PLAGUE OF FROGS. God bless Russell Edson.

We all live downstream. Osteoblast
rings are an enormous thing. Have you
ever seen inside the heart? If you have, you have entered
a forest. Ventricles abound. Now lie down on its floor.
Looking up is the miasma of trees; leucocytes
scan the scene – can you believe it? You are watching your chest -
I am here thinking it is a man’s, the men I love
that is the you in this poem and you are under
the parasoling canopy. Parasols are protectors: that is me.
And past the chest is the plasma TV. And I am
watching Micheline on America’s Got Talent, she
is the younger sister of my puppy love, assistant to the magician
Antonio, a man with Zappa zombie raging hair. And fire. And blood.
The zapper instructs us on. Down another
chamber, the dolphins are hemorrhaging from Corexit.
What has fallen is vexed –
foul fruit has fallen from the tree, mutinous breadfruit. Beaches are aflame.
The workers are pleading, I mean bleeding.
Is this why my left brain hurts? The headache, I think, is fallout or pollen or waves.
And the water children build sandcastles, moats retort an invisible oil,
the solvent explodes. So what if I am angry, will this solve it?
At Squaw Valley, that name, poets write about birds drenched in crude,
but we don’t want to say it. This is true: E – co-tro -city.
It feels weird to admit. To write it. I flip
back to Micheline. Everyone is so grateful
and loving, having their American dream. But BP is just
over there, the crab making every attempt to save
his house, a charcoaled shell. His moonmother was made for fish.
The gusher is now a leak shooting ink. The white man
with feathered trim croons the Reverend. Michael Grimm, the kind
with the two m’s, goes on singing. Even Al Green can’t clean
this. The heart pulsates. The molar undulates, is a mountain
made for cannibalism. This ends the show,
I mean home, I mean -What has happened?
Damn you, you hellmouth, this was supposed to be
a love poem.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

STATEMENT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Katherine Factor was born near the Mississippi but now lives in the San Jacinto mountains. She has work forthcoming in Quarterly West and the Colorado Review.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Steven Karl is the author of the collaborative chapbook, State(s) of Flux, with Joseph Lappie (Peptic Robot Press, 2009) and the chapbook,(Ir)Rational Animals (Flying Guillotine Press, 2010).  He has e-chaps forthcoming from Scantily Clad Press and h_ngm_n.  He lives in New York City and blogs here and does this.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

STATEMENT

I am an employee of the British Museum and on September 1st 2010 a group staged a protest against BP’s long standing support and sponsorship of Museum events and programs. I experienced the protest first hand, and this poem stands as a response. Here are two links to the incident itself, filmed by the group.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

SJ Fowler is a concrete, sound and experimental poet. His work has been featured in over 60 journals and magazines, and his collections and pamphlets have been published by over a dozen presses. He is a member of the Writers Forum, the London based avant-garde poetry group formed in the mid-1950s by Bob Cobbing. He edits the Maintenant interview series for 3am magazine, introducing avant garde European poetry into England. His work is concerned with the latency of repression in capitalist culture, and often, the sport of boxing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Laura Quigley is a writer from south west england, writing mainly for performance, with Amnesty holding a reading of her human rights play “the advocate” in London on 2nd November 2010. She’s also had some success in short stories, films and poetry, the latter mostly published in Reflections magazine (ed. Steve Smith), with a few local prizes. By 2011, she should have her second full length play finished, a thriller about activitists, mangroves and seawater greenhouses.

She is also an active member of Amnesty International and writes about human rights. Her next stage play is about environmental disasters and alternative energy sources.

One/ This is the world: we agree on that much. Spilling, they loll on their mojo here and there, hurling much to the winds. Idle. Ashing. Desperately kindled. Roasting marshmallowy virgins on the points of bayonets. Muffled within the uncanny. Incandescent. Not to blame. (Above all, not to blame!) Regard their beautiful mugs and wistful abs. I hobbled, veiled, among them like a vendor on the strand. Like a démodé prophet, lip-synching codas, while they stoutly maintained that Being’s a self-starter, that whatever “takes place” would have done so anyway without our intervention, that politics is a reflex, superstitious behavior or else Tourette’s syndrome (This is the world, I said, and they said it didn’t matter.) We better get global warming figured out toot sweet, they moaned, cranking up the AC. They did it without a blush of irony. For them, it’s a no-brainer. This is the world. Where you can do anything. Synthesize a garden or tweet about Art. Pour concrete and sprinkle designer compost and sow exotic grasses. Draft an ars poetica on your mobile. Stock the second freezer with mice to feed the python. Where everything is superfluous like our bodies, but only an ant is more or less foolproof. I can’t get them out of my kitchen. This is the weird. Where nothing helps anything.

Two/ Veiled to the nines, I said we should cast them out.

Three/ An Ant! An Enemy! Morning!

Four/ This heat reminds me of something. I was traveling incognito as a child. And this was the world, and this was America. Riding, I remember, car windows rolled down, in the back seat of the Chevy station wagon, muffled within the uncanny, through some parched provincial state—Idaho, Montana. Stopped at a budget motel, chlorine pool by the parking lot. Dove in, displaying mediocre form. Some limb too much akimbo, Father said. Floated, blissfully far from criticism. And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

Five/ It seemed possible I’d spilled a little sugar on the counter.

Six/ I divide my time (now) between the cloud and the ledge. And this too is the world as seen from my brittle plenitude. (Cast it off. Loose it to the winds.) This was (is) the world in need of prayer or channeling. Anywhere—while arranging the white squares of ant traps!—you might experience a kundalini wakeup call. Divide the veil in two and pin it back. Think of the pubic bone’s halves like butterfly wings. Root down to the earth through your pelvic floor. Enjoy your teeth. Absorb your brush with breath. Be sure to wash your hands after handling the traps. The captain has turned on the sha-nah-nah sign. I presume we’re cleared for takeout. We’ll be on the ground in stitches.

Seven/ Veils on top of veils, all utterly transparent. The ants, a lot of them, had found a point of interest over by the stove. It seemed I could write it down, but nuances would vanish. Nobody would get it. I wrote what I overheard. Some consider it purloined. On the radio, journalists spoke of “driving eyeballs to the page.” I pictured (out of Buñuel or Dalí) a shepherd herding his ocular flock to pasture, then learned the phrase was only bloggerese for the effort to capture readers. For years on end, locked down in the seminar, I talked mainly to myself, but possibly it was healthy for the students to witness a female elder’s over-involvement with the text. I silently deplored their inveterate cleavage and spoke in tongues weakly from the parapet of my wimple. Discreetly, under the table, they checked their messages or IM’d fuck buddies. This is the world and this is human endeavor. He created an index card for each of his lovers, including a coded notation of penis size. She used the pen name Adonis for her man-on-man porn, but still couldn’t get an agent. She had a flawed idea of male arousal or possibly just the market. Note I said sow not spill (I meant the seed). While walking in the garden near the lacinato kale, I came upon a woman in a tank top. One shapely limb was raised above her head and what took away my breath (but only metaphorically) was the swirled tuft of hair licking up from the delicate hollow. I worshipped venery briefly in her sexual penumbra, as beads of water clung in the dimpled surfaces of cruciferous vegetable foliage. This was the world, where what I wanted didn’t count. “Shave your eardrums.” What was that you said. Oh, underarms. Armpits. Pluck your eyebrows while you’re at it. How do you “thread” an eyebrow? And how do you decide between “sow” and “spill”? Which do you do with seed? (Or—“sew” the seed, a frill.)

Eight/ The ants boil up through pinpoint holes between the counter tiles. I should be thinking of grouting, caulking.

Nine/ It didn’t matter what I wanted, nothing helps anything. A tummy tuck, a water cure, a pose on a sticky mat. Mad ants got into my stash of medjool dates. Extinction kept unfurling in the wings. This was the world and it was dying, blatantly. Had been at it so long I’d sort of gotten acclimated. From Day One, my lullaby had been, “Wake not the sleeping aporia. Mind the hypoxic zone.” Gaily decked out in mufti, one perceives no need for corsets. “And why would you need to put full makeup on just to read The Idiot and Theodicy?” Thus barricaded calmly within the wiki burqa, we loll and spill and sow and toil and maim, maintaining (startled, sorry, reminiscent) that Being’s a self-starter, that direct action is the whippet of the masses, that nothing takes place because of our tenderness. Thus do we palpate romance.

Ten/ The exterminator came in the heat of the afternoon: round-bodied, graying, wearing a dark blue uniform. He mopped his brow and spoke of the End of Days in a light West Indian accent. “I don’t know how religious you are, but there’s a man on the radio, maybe you’ve heard about him—he predicts that on May 11 of next year…that’s when He is coming to establish His kingdom. If that is true, our time is very short.” “But what do you think?” I wanted to know, always a sucker for eschatology. The exterminator paused, repositioning his nozzle. He appeared to be a man who took pride in his work. “I pay close attention when it says in the Bible: ‘You will know not the day nor the hour.’ I don’t see how anyone could know a thing like that.” While I was making out the check, he noticed my funny aloe plant, deformed by its affinity for indirect light. “Back home on my island, we break off a piece for any cut, bruise, or sting. That’s your pharmacy right there.”

Eleven/ She walks these hills in a long black limousine. She walks these hills in a crumpled Humvee. She walks these hills in a rusty old beater. She walks these hills in a knockout static kill. She walks these hills in a billowy blind shear ram. She walks these hills in a skimpy blowout preventer. Baby doll, baby doll.

Twelve/ I wondered: what would happen to the sky?

Thirteen/ Within its wild veil, the gritty scatter of the belly. This was the world. Why are they hurting it here? (And so I hunkered down and played with fire.) It strikes me that I know so very little in the round, about creation’s lumps and lunges, all its sore latitudes. That humming umbilical engine, under-girding everything, muffled within the din of spill&cleanup. (And so I hunkered down and burned with art.) A gulf is a gulf of relations—this much was clear to me, though I’m not even a woman in the regular sense (for instead of multiplying, I want to be alone, protected by the thick, opaque curtains of sentences that enfold my face and body). It was just water. It was just trees. It was just grass. It was just time. It was there for the living and I’ve never forgotten, here in my cloistered purview, no longer beset by ants, whose antics made me think of the old-fashioned raves my students used to frequent. Everyone would rush to find a party in some warehouse and their rushing in a crowd was the party. “I used to walk to the self along with others” (Darwish). I’m missing them already though they drove me up the wall when I found them in my oatmeal, in my tea. In Spain the pretty bimbos sported fabulous torture-shoes, adorable balls and arches lifted up in flagrant pedi-crucifixions over Roman paving stones. Newspapers filled their pages with debates about the banning of a simple facial garment. I hiked through art museums full of annunciations, flayings. Flew home (enlarging my carbon footprint) and found much the same—cheap amalgam of racialized hooey and imperial conflagration. Autos de fé. Everything twice as tacky as it was before lunch. Why were they hurting it here? I prophesied. I veiled. I came too late to drive the demons out.

Fourteen/ This was the world: belly-land, belly-sea. A bayoneted cradle was blocking the road. Earth lay before me, disemboweled to the horizon. It didn’t matter what I wanted.

Fifteen/ I spilled and spilled.

Sixteen/ I wanted the world to live.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jan Clausen’s eleven books include five volumes of poetry, the novels Sinking, Stealing and The Prosperine Papers, and the memoir Apples and Orange. Her most recent poetry titles, From a Glass House (IKON) and If You Like Difficulty (Harbor Mountain Press), both came out in 2007. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Coconut, Drunken Boat, Fence, Hanging Loose, The Hat, Heliotrope, Kenyon Review, North American Review, the Library of America volume Poems from the Women’s Movement, Ploughshares, Tarpaulin Sky, and The Village Voice, in addition to many other journals and anthologies. Clausen frequently reviews books and the literary scene for publications including Boston Review, Ms., The Nation, Poets and Writers, and The Women’s Review of Books. A feminist activist since the 1970’s, she was a founding editor of the lesbian feminist literary journal Conditions. The recipient of writing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and NYFA, she teaches creative writing in the Goddard College MFA in Writing Program.