9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine x and Eleven (2018)

Three years ago today New Star Books and I launched 9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven at Massy Books in Vancouver's Chinatown. Both the book and the bookstore are still "in print".

Unknown Translation of a Poem by Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973)

I Step Outside Myself

I step outside

myself, out of my eyes,

hands, mouth, outside

of myself I

step, a bundle

of goodness and godliness

that must make good

this devilry

that has happened.

A Recently Discovered "Lost" Poem by Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

Winter Colony

 Stylishly, in the white season,

we come here wearing awkward logs

on our feet, to skate on icebergs,

to ride pulleys into the sky

and ride the sky down.

 

We ride the sky down,

our voices falling back behind us,

unraveling like smooth threads.

Say, I am the air I break; or say,

I am a spool unwinding.

 

I am the spool that unwound

while riding the sky down, that waits

now to ride the pulley back into the sky,

that comes here, stylishly,

each weekend, for the same trick

in the white season.

 

from The Christian Science Monitor, February 12, 1959

Touch the Donkey, No. 25

A lot of poems these days as lineless blocks and those with lines that break for no reason, as if their authors take their cues from pictures, which is fine, we're a visual culture.

The current issue of Touch the Donkey features nine poets, three of whom are women. Of these three, all favour long lines, if not the block or a single stanza.

One poet, émilie kneifel, provides little biographical information, apart from collecting lost teeth and directing us to emiliekneifel.com.

Here is the opening of kneifel's atmospheric poem "two siblings visit the third in toronto":

a honk is a person, two at least, colliding or almost. it's them in that
whoosh, the cars and cars and cars commuting, the always lights
with which to see.

A shimmering image for this reader. But two words stand out: "almost" and "always".

Aphorythmia

The world speeds up, compresses. Yesterday's tendrils are today's hard edges. Now it's all tube. The film Brazil.

Literature's shifted too. Poetry in particular. Lists and litanies. All for a line that sticks -- a tweet in search of its meme.

Danielle LaFrance is facilitating a workshop at SFU Audain Gallery on March 4th. Not sure if there are spaces left.

Here's a great line from the notes section ("NOTESKNOTSNOTSNAUGHTS") of LaFrance's Just Like I Like It:

"Depression is just anger without enthusiasm." (123)

Notice

American Writer

Adverbs

after Gertrude Stein

imagine her pained

expression we have little

footage of her feelings

happy in Garches

at her brother Michael’s

bemused to read

the libretto

“From Four Saints

in Three Acts”

in the States

though where exactly

no one knows I talk

exactly as I write

she says putting on

her glasses 

but exactly -- an adverb

after all she wrote

without them!

American Sentences

At some point in the mid-1980s Allen Ginsberg announced the American Sentence -- a monostich based on the Japanese haiku (three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables, respectively), but on a single line. Ginsberg said these poems could have titles, like this one from John Ashbery's "As We Know" (1979):

I HAD THOUGHT THINGS WERE GOING ALONG WELL

But I was mistaken.

Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970)

The Poetry Foundation has uploaded a few more Lorine Niedecker poems since last I checked. Niedecker's "I rose from mud marsh" can be found in Jenny Penberthy's intelligent collected. (Althea's Listers of Earthy has mud on my mind.)


I ROSE FROM MUD MARSH

I rose from marsh mud,

algae, equisetum, willows,

sweet green, noisy

birds and frogs

to see her wed in the rich

rich silence of the church,

the little white slave-girl

in her diamond fronds.

In aisle and arch

the satin secret collects.

United for life to serve

silver. Possessed.

A Poem by Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970)

FORECLOSURE

Tell em to take my bare walls down
my cement abutments
their parties thereof
and clause of claws

Leave me the land
Scratch out: the land

May prose and property both die out
and leave me peace

Adventures in Photo-Concrete

A Poem By P.K. Page (1916-2010)

STEFAN

Stefan
aged eleven
looked at the baby and said
"When he thinks it must be pure thought
because he hasn't any words yet"
and we
proud parents
admiring friends
who had looked at the baby

looked at the baby again.