Featured Poet: John Beer

J. Beer 1969-1969

It was when they determined that I had been born dead
That my life became easier to understand. For a long time,
I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them,
Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone’s ear,
Frankly, why I never had any money. I wondered
Why the cities I walked through drifted into cloud
Even as I admired their architecture, as I pointed out
The cornerstones marked “1820,” “1950.” The only songs
I ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from
A time when dead ones like me were a dime a dozen.
I spent my life in hotels: some looked like mansions,
Some more like trailer parks, or pathways toward
A future I tried to point to, but how could I point,
With nothing but a hand no hand ever matched,
With fingers that melted into words that no one read.

I rehearsed names that others taught me: Caravaggio,
Robert Brandom, Judith, Amber, Emmanuelle Cat.
I got hungry the way only the dead get hungry,
The hunger that launches a thousand dirty wars,
But I never took part in the wars, because no one lets
A dead man into their covert discussions.
So I drifted from loft to cellar, ageless like a ghost,
And America became my compass, and Europe became
The way that dead folks talk, in short, who cares,
There’s nothing to say because nobody listens,
There’s no radio for the dead and the pillows seem

Like sand. Let me explain: when you’re alive,
As I understand it, pillows cushion the head, the way
A lover might soothe the heart. The way it works for me,
In contrast, is everything is sand. Beds are sand,
The women I profess to love are sand, the sound of music
In the darkest night is sand, and whatever I have to say
Is sand. This is not, for example, a political poem,
Because the dead have no politics. They might have
A hunger, but nothing you’ve ever known
Could begin to assuage it.





Speak Yon Undiscovered Towers

Remember how we ran across each other
Waiting on the L train, in hot Williamsburg?
I had some undeveloped photographs
With which I planned to establish
The reign of light, ten thousand years
Of light. I couldn’t quite explain

How one and one makes two, it’s
A postulate, nobody’s interested, there’s
No profits in houses or anything but
War, forever, and girls shipped over the border
From Moldavia to Oslo, from villages
On the fringes of Chiang Mai to Yonkers

And to San Francisco and everywhere that
Poetry, unwished for, flourishes,
A disease of language, while meanwhile
I left my papers on the airplane. Did you
Find them yet? I have a lot to prepare for,
Repent for, no cats in this vicinity,

Slow music is the worst kind of music,
The world I speak for can never exist,
But Shelley already took care of that,
Yeah, Shelley and Charles Bernstein and whoever,
And no one saw the fires on the towers,
What towers? It was good to see you.





Charles Bukowski

There appeared to be two schools of thought.
On the one hand, universal order,
Whatever that means, land mines and bank accounts,
Risk arbitrage, interrogations in dark rooms,
Stress positions, honorary degrees,
A clean, well-sculpted lawn,
Haircuts on a regular schedule. Yeah, and the
Other hand. Seventy years is more than enough.

It’s not as though I admire Charles Bukowski.
He was drunk and self-aggrandizing,
As drunks most often are. Look at me,
For instance. I didn’t mean to say that.
Look at me, for instance.





2 Legit 2 Quit

for Dan McCann

It’s getting kind of late. I stand next to my love,
All right, I’m standing next to a skeleton,
It appears to be a raccoon skeleton, given the sharp
Teeth, given the sign underneath that says, “Raccoon.”

I wouldn’t say, necessarily, that my life has been
The happiest. Sure, I’ve had my share of barroom
Brawls, I’ve driven the big rigs across ice fields,
I was the winningest contestant ever on “Beat the Braggart.”

What I’ll remember most, though, when I’m gone,
Which could be anytime, is how the night sky looks,
If you get out far enough, like a sea of diamonds
That belongs to everyone. I’m a sentimental fool:

I still believe in love. I still believe in a life
In which everybody matters. I know that
Every poem’s an epitaph. The sky’s around for now:
That’s me that’s walking into it.





© 2009 John Beer

Featured Poet: Jules Gibbs

“Instead of seeing,
we should make excavations in the eye; instead of hearing, we should juxtapose sounds
in an emotional clitter-clatter.”

— Wallace Stevens, “The Irrational Element in Poetry”

TUSSLE


Deep in the jejunum, factory
of post-vertebral reasoning,
a concordant tome
produces a quasar, a nolo
prow for the cocky free speech
of her conceptual A posse.

The historic nonstandard
of her one congratulatory chromosome
says: You’re blocked; he’s Virgo
as any jellyfish, recherché, hopes you’re free.

Volcano at fifteen, she’s a woman
by reprisal, catalyst
doing battle, unashamed
as an evening gazette corrigendum.

It’s like the last rational brain cell
whispering to a girl gone wild: Tussle,
you got some time —your future depends on it.

As many other girls have discovered

the hard way,

there’s nothing worse than creating
an expectation — then failing to deliver.





WILLKOMMEN


It’s so male, the road to Berlin,
so cognac and generous
with its prompts and sign-in
guidelines. Who here can explain
Rensselear aquatics?
Just do the notation—
in the parallelized loop variables
ii, jj and kk are private
to each thread
while n columns and n rows
are shared. Everything by definition:
boolean; ocean; chuff. A tycoon
with pretensions.
Wie lange bleibst du heir?
Empirical evidence says:
Let’s keep in touch. Wait —
I almost forgot my greatcoat,
my shelter, my soup of maturity —





SALES PITCH No. 14:
IF YOU CAN’T REMEMBER, IT DIDN’T REALLY HAPPEN


We succeed in two vital areas:
toner and ink. Samples are being shipped
to your area now. Yes, it’s true

forgetfulness can be a symptom
of more serious problems: renal, miasmal,
the coming crash of civilization —

the government’s aware of all this —
how could I be wrong? Buns full fledged;
suppositories at your privation; bras

discounted; nicotine cravings cut.
Science has proven the human body
doesn’t have to age — you simply place

a drop in your drink, then
search/ chat/ flirt/ date.
She might say she’s glad to fuck you again,

but you can’t really evaluate a sentence
you don’t possess with your memory.
Go ahead, oink — please her many, many times.





PROTECTED SEA BIRDS OF THE BRITISH ISLES


Epic Alexander claimed the I
in Pythagorean, the too
in fervent, but not the lion.
You have the experience but lack
a proper university degree.
Still, with Sirius receding,
Salvador can mitigate.
Is it worthwhile to expedite
the asynchronous
retrieval of the redshank?
Let’s go check it out —





THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING DADA


How did we stumble upon
this chromatogram of web
recomendada, a dot-com
beautification project?

It’s abusable.

Try again, preponderant churchgoer —
I think I can help you work out
the fit, design and power
of your gingerbread sloop
and when all that is done
commit to the market-wise,
turn your passion into an empire.





THE TORTURE CHAMBER IS NO PLACE FOR AN OIL MAN


Our President is a euphemist, a midshipman
sailing a casket through La Femme Defoncer —
nationally, savagely. Someone wants to meet him.

With scherzo mirth the talking radio hums
strangulation and sunburn, sunburn
and acetylene distillate — a gas station collapse.

Danke fur Ihre Anfrage, the sagging caliphate
explains the trouble to three level one employees
and then to our Overlord of Customer Service:

As we age, our bodies produce less and less of this, and this
is the very reason we age — ire, jaundice, fearful phylogeny — is it any wonder
people are turning to anti-gravity, sun microsystems, cremation?

For the next twelve weeks they will face
Spartan conditions, deprivation, tasks designed
to take morale to a breaking point.

(It is good to see the pieces of the puzzle
coming together one by one, a pigeon to forge the deal.)

The enquiry arrives like a sandbag
in the baptismal —
in his gotcha exit, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

confessed,

and now he wants his fingers back.



















Jules Gibbs

© Copyright 2008 Jules Gibbs

Featured Poet: Steven D. Schroeder

Late Night Driver at Lightning Lizard Pizza


Dan ducks out at nine, his shaky, smoky
Econoline panel truck shorthand for Hollywood
pedophiles, serial killers, and terrorists.

A large pepperoni delivered to the First Amendment
porno bookstore counter, but the transaction lacks
a bow chicka wow wow soundtracked encounter

with a bored and horny housewife who can’t pay—
with money, anyway. Even in darkness
with double doors open, the conveyor oven ripples

superheated air everywhere but the walk-in
cooler of pseudosalad lettuce and ranch packets,
Coke cans and precooked Buffalo chicken wads.

(Who would swallow a thing called Lizard Wings?)
Orders for the Comm Corr work release motel,
ever a low-tip zone, quickly slip to zero

after curfew. Perhaps it’s pizzeria hazing
that drivers also wash the dishes in the half hour
silences between phone rings, stuck dough scrubbed

from tubs, hands chapped and crackling—in his office,
the owner scratch scratches a batch of fresh red numbers
using his own blood. Route home a memorized

maze of houses and apartments, the alternator
off-and-on-again fogs with fatigue, its dying
spot a streetlit stop at the right address.





Advice on the Psych Ward


Oh yes, you’re not supposed to be here. If you tell a doctor so, he or she will be legally free to free you. Be sure to shriek it by the Marquess of Queensberry rules, boxing air and baring underwear on your fists.

A doctor is a door you must unbolt. A doctor will bore through your eyelids with four interrogation lamps to ask how you sleep. Say With a bonnie Scottish dirk under my pillow, and he or she will switch your mattress board with a litter box of kittens.

Mew.

Hand the nurse a can of contraband, Diet Dr. Pepper, for extra gray and Prozac ground into your gruel. Savor the leftovers when you wake with your arms crossed like a lockbox vampire, paler than the hovering fluorescent tubes.

You can trade scissors to that patient for a painting of scissors. That patient you should avoid. That one you can draw on in crayon while the television hums behind obsidian, the idiot doctor doctors oblivious.

Doctor the scabbed flesh on your forearms with bed sheets not fitted for your hidden ladder. Let the kittens lick your wrists. Wait. Then make the ceiling dinge flake with the sudden pain of your escape.





Who Sketches the Sketchers


Doodles of scratches of scribbles of men
with sideways beards pressed down so hard
the paper rips, of women whose necks
are stalks on thickly trunks, fingertips
sharp as pencils, every body
wobbly and daubed with eraser droppings,
when one of the figures, could be he
or she in those block clothes, unsticks
from its backdrop, the flatline horizon,
clouds as angelic heliports, triangular
houses or mountains or flames afloat
in the basalt sea of a lunar crater,
prestidigitates on the tablet
a pen out of its rib, never lifting
nib from page, and leaves its own image
of human: at least eleven dimensions,
asymptote arms and Möbius heart,
hands drawing hands drawing together
so we can drive them aside to add
a shadow miming a sucker punch,
police lights and siren, always amok,
a scar that puckers a pegleg’s length,
and knives peeking from under the knuckles.





Albuquerque Low


The out-of-state delivery truck up the Front Range
to dump its freight, its freezer crates of wet
deadweight spattering the Springs. Parking lot ruts
wheelspin into bottomless crevasses traversed
crosswise in icy reverse. Cataracts crust
the windshield at each skateblade wiper swipe.

Antilock brakes firing hard as neurons,
these SUVs are heading for a wreck
or already had one, skidding sidelong
into oblivion. Downfall drowns
Nevada Avenue, swallows ground
and builds a wholly whitewalled town.
Couldn’t hold a job salting walkways
for Eskimos with only four more

shopping days till Christmas.
Cold hands, blue heart, they say
this winter of bitter drifts
off the offramp, engine block
not hot enough to cook on.
No drive, no crash, no option
to wake from hibernation
in April, numb from months
of the motor shutting down.
Under the seat is a gun.





Steven D. Schroeder's first full-length book of poems, Torched Verse Ends, is forthcoming from BlazeVOX in Spring 2009. His poetry is recently available or forthcoming from Verse, Beloit Poetry Journal, Barrow Street, Court Green, and Verse Daily. He edits the online poetry journal Anti- and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer.


© 2008 Steven D. Schroeder

Featured Poet: Michael Theune

The Value of Man


In a museum in London there is an exhibit called “The Value of Man”: a long coffinlike box with lots of compartments where they’ve put starch—phosphorus—flour—bottles of water and alcohol—and big pieces of gelatin. I am a man like that.

—Stephane Mallarmé, letter dated May 17, 1867

One man feels lifted up.
Another, drained.

One man is frightened:
Our emptiness is so real.
One man takes comfort:
So our emptiness is real.

One man marvels.
Another can’t stand that
Our vision rises up just
To give us…this—

Indignant, one man
Thinks this is in bad faith.
Indignant, another
Thinks this is in bad taste.

One man does the math,
Works it out: about
Three pounds and change.
One man wants to know
What is the value of woman?
Is it the same?

One man decides to marry.
Another, to leave his wife.

One man feels angelic.
One man thinks he’ll run amok.
One man wants to know exactly
What phosphorus and gelatin are.

One man decides Christ
Was lucky to have been
Butchered—at least that way
He felt right up to the end
That he had a soul.

Looking at his reflection
In the case’s glass, one man
Sucks in his cheeks a bit.
Another brushes his hair.

Aghast, one man thinks it is too ugly.
Another wonders if it’s too aesthetic,
If the neatly arranged boxes
And the crystal decanters might
Give someone the wrong idea.

One man thinks, Just as I thought.

One man thinks science instills
An appreciation of design.
Another thinks, Evolution.
Another, The Fall—

One man thinks of a grocer’s shelf.
Another of a cold crucible
To purify the mind.

One man thinks it is too antiseptic.
Another wants to know, What’s that smell?

One man thinks, I could do this.
Another wants to purchase one of his own.

One man begins to imagine equality,
A Brotherhood of Man.
Another thinks, Mixed right, this
Material could make a bomb.

One man looks up quizzically at another man.
One man thinks, I am a man like that.

One man finds the experience educational.
Another feels quite simply he has paid
Too much for his admission.







from Orthoparadoxy


A student could acquire a considerable amount of literary knowledge by saying the opposite of what the poets of this century have said. He would replace their affirmations with negations.

—Lautréamont

Blake: A thing seen correctly reveals infinity.
Bataille: A thing seen correctly reveals that it need not have been . . . and, through that hole, infinity.


*


The world is a strange mixture of mystery and circularity.


*


So we live in a post-rational age . . . who cares? There will be more thinking now than ever before. Nothing needs to be more precise than hypnosis.


*


One fears in the merely avant-garde that the whole gist of the spirit is schism.


*


Meaning is inevitable. But that inevitability? Madness!


*


The skeptics know more than they claim to know. The dogmatists know less than they claim to know. This is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

—Is this a skeptical or a dogmatic claim?

*


Anything said about The Moment must, like all fairy tales, begin, Once upon a time . . .


*


We live by the truth. We die by the truth. There is no other way.


*


When asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus came up with the brilliant, Love the Lord your God with all your heart . . . But what if he had been asked what the worst sin was? Would he have been as good a theorist as René Girard to respond, Mimetic rivalry?


*


Vision has become a version.


*


Still, angels and demons are symbols you need guts to call symbols.


*


Do I contradict myself? Fine, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain platitudes.


*


To be a saint: suffer appropriately.


*


Second thoughts are tinder for the flames of Hell.


*


The infinite distance between the passengers and the pilgrims.


*


The spirit is willing, but it is not real.


*


A tension is the natural piety of the soul.


*


Mysticism: my consolation for writer’s block.


*


Canetti said, That man interprets death. One might add, That death—interpreted, translated, transfigured—still confounds and sustains man.


*


Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must scream, laugh, grunt, cry.


*


I loathe, and incite my soul.


*


Let’s begin by admitting the big bang was a subtle thing, for, as no one was around to hear it, it was silent, and, as no one was around to compare it to anything, it could not have been big. Ultimately, the term, big bang, seems like special effects, a self-congratulatory assertion of science’s authority, a celebration of its ideas with fireworks.


*


Cold comfort: God is not forgetful; He is omnipatient.


*


On the Small Difference between Simplicity and Complexity

The rain that gives the roofers work sends the roofers home.

*


Appearances must be weightier than Being. Appearances must be supported by the mighty Being while Being requires only the support of a few mere Appearances.


*


Frost 2000: Good gates make good communities.


*


Our decisions are big though our lives are small.


*


After the French Revolution, Byron referred to humans as fiery dust. Now, after the Industrial Revolution and its assembly line, humans are more properly referred to as processed particles.


*


The modern search for truth too often seems like a search for some loophole in the jargon.


*


All around the world, the mighty ocean musters all its strength to cry pssst! and shhh . . .


*


The nature of self-awareness is misunderstood. It is not calm. It is vertiginous, a maelstrom. It happens to calm in times of trouble only because waves occasionally cancel each other out.


*


The project is not to destroy happiness but to make happiness possible, to humanize it. This, of course, requires discovering what the human is—an unhappy venture, indeed!


*


Love’s impossibility may be its only hope.


*


According to Joseph Campbell, the main lesson of the myths through the ages and across cultures is that one might actually, deep within, be sovereign, that one’s true self is majestic. Does anyone believe this anymore? Now, if you want people to go on quests, to change their lives, it might be better to tell them, You were not born to reign, but neither were they . . .


*


If only I had wished for a young man’s life of mistakes and repentances, long stretches of shame illuminated by moments of inspiration, then I would have everything I wanted.


*


On the Supposed Unity of Self

Just try explaining your friends to your friends.

*


Either the world is as I perceive it to be, or else I have been making constant perceptual misjudgments of the world in which case the world would not be the world, but at least it would be mine.


*


Into how many rivers have I stepped once?


*


Yesterday is only a day away.


*


The truth is not an answer but what is answered to.










Marginalia

—after Edmond Jabès

Beneath the streetlamp, snow sweeps
From dark to dark. To speak of facts
Is to go beyond the world.

To speak of the world is to go
Beyond facts. The godless night,
But still the search for a certain word—

A stack of books with spines like strata.
Arguments settled like dust.
Where the world ends, does the darkness?

No one could say.
The Book of Night opens with and contains
Each longing. The archangels

Protect those who seek the truth.
They make the truth
Impossible to find.

The rustling of a page is the rustling of a wing.








Try To Change the Mutilated World

Try to praise the mutilated world.

—Adam Zagajewski

Try to change the mutilated world.
Of course, you feel powerless.
Of course, you wonder how far
Your voice will go. Of course, you despair.
Nothing changes until it does.
You must change the mutilated world.
Of course, you want to live in peace.
Of course, good yourself, you believe
The world is our spotless source, but
Ask those profiled, tortured, cleansed, slain,
And they will tell you: It is not.
You should change the mutilated world.
Of course, you are not blameless.
Of course, you are privileged.
Of course, you are too proud.
Of course, you like to sing, not demonstrate.
But you must change the mutilated world.
You have no choice: you must
Love and suffer and prophesize and act
Or else mutilate.





Michael Theune studied creative writing at the University of Iowa and the University of Houston. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Pindeldyboz, and Verse. Michael is a regular contributor to Pleiades, where he is a contributing editor. Michael also is the editor of Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns (Teachers & Writers, 2007), the first poetry writing guide to focus on the turn as a significant component in poems. He teaches English at Illinois Wesleyan University, in Bloomington, Illinois.

© 2008 Michael Theune

Featured Poet: Daniel Borzutzky

from The Books

The Book of Graves

“Writing is learning to die. It’s learning not to be afraid, in other words to live at the extremity of life, which is what the dead, death, give us.” (Helene Cixous, translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers)


The Book of Graves is buried beneath the tower of books. To find it the reader must dig, she must use the other books as shovels, she must dig with her hands and feet, and hide in shadows so that the sun will not burn her. There are few trees near the tower of books, and those that still stand have dead leaves, but at certain times of day the books themselves cast shadows, and we who read must constantly move in order to stay safe from the sun, which, in the Book of Books, burns the limbs off readers, off writers, off residents who live in the world of images, of ghosts, of dreams. Dig for the Book of Graves, the signs say, and you will find it next to a ladder that helps you move from one book to another, from one country to another, from one bloody word to another. Don’t climb up the ladder, the words say, you’ll dissolve into the earth; but if the ladder lets you descend, then by all means, descend, and take the Book of Graves with you, and wait for something to happen, anything—an ant to crawl, a volcano to erupt—and soon enough the third chapter of the grave that is the Book of Graves will open its lid, and you will crawl in, and you will be with the dead, or you will be dead, and the smell of putrefaction will itself be a story. Yes, the Book of Graves is written in odors: this is the smell of the holy book as it is bathed in excrement and shoved into the hands of the bearded man who screams for his mothers and country and who thinks he now is a palm tree or a bit of a rust on a barbed-wire fence: there are countries in his beard: countries of dead hairs that smell of wedding preparations in a country of rubble, a country where the ancient implodes and the modern implodes and the body parts that fall from the sky smell like vinegar; they split open as they fall and more countries fall out of them and the dead countries smell like wet rugs whose shags shelter the last spasms of birds and grasshoppers, lizards and frogs. And the smell of decomposition forms words which involuntarily leap onto pages and form voices, murmurs from a purgatory that is far worse than hell; and the page flips and there are odors: here is the smell of an old, wet, leather binding to a book wherein the dead who do not believe in life after death moan in resentment; here is the smell of blood that has mixed with ink and formed rivers from which fish ascend into a sea-sky where the algae weighs hundreds of pounds and there in the sky on the edge of the horizon the hair burns and the shoes burn and the skin burns off those bodies who were promised that death is sudden but instead it is a long shower of hail and words and words and hail and the hail and the words are interchangeable just as the gas and the electricity are interchangeable and the lightning and the sun are interchangeable and the rivers and the trees are interchangeable. The residents of the Book of Graves are monsters: they are like people who forgot to stop breathing when they die. They breathe and forget, they breathe and forget: the odor of life and memory.










The Book of Echoes

The reader who opens the Book of Echoes finds a village where no one lives and nothing grows and where all the houses are empty. A famished-looking man meets the reader at the entrance to the village. I know that you came to find the Book of Echoes, says the man, who now takes the reader on a tour through the village, but it is gone. It has vanished. Or better said, the Book of Echoes is indistinguishable from the living echoes that the ghost-men and the god-men intone as they search for an exit from purgatory. A few flips of the pages and soon the book disappears and there are ghost-men and God-men who march through the village looking for an audience to hear what they have to peddle. A man opens his mouth and a little bomb drops out of it and when it detonates books and rivers form out of the ashes. The reader opens a page from one of the new books that has been birthed by the bomb. On the first page there is a country and everyone in it smiles. They are not happy but the law says they must smile or their teeth and lips will be ripped from their faces. They smile and sob at the same time and their sobs echo and the little bombs that fall from the mouths of the writers and readers echo and the silence echoes and the tour guide who brought the reader into the Book of Echoes says to the reader: It’s been a long time since you’ve been gone. You have been here before; this village hides in another village in another book that you have previously entered. A bomb falls out of the tour guide’s mouth and thousands of poems spill out and there is a desert and there are bones that tell stories of the families who live on the margins of this book: they are parables, sure, but they too drop bombs out of their mouths and from their arm pits and they store bombs in their knees and they fling bombs with their fingers and toes. And the bombs are like poems and rain and static and the horns of buses and trucks; and they fill the smiles of the citizens; and the echoes of the bombs are like little blessings that teach us how to blow up all the lies that have taught us to live. Yes the bombs in this book are blessings and the citizens smile at them and sob and there are cities on the horizon exploding and bodies falling from air planes and the bodies buzz when the reader holds them to her chest and in the vibration of the lifeless bodies there is one long oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo; and the moment the ooooooooooooooooooooooo ends the reader finds a mirror and in the glass there is a baby breathing in a field and in the bomb that is the baby’s cry there is breath and more breath and there is the memory of the time when the citizens of the village did not smile instead they wore sadness on their faces and they laughed and there were words written in the river, and the river said grow and smile and don’t smile, and there was a leg that floated into the picture and it was a prayer and we tossed it to the citizens and they smiled and read the leg and held it to their cheeks and it echoed across the entire village and the citizens laid down to die in the beds where they were born but they could not die; they could only sob and murmur and smile.