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Americans / An Anti-Poem / It Chose Me / Reading Notes

Photo on 4-8-15 at 9.02 PM 12:10 Long week & I have 4 hours to give this (Joshua’s book) to Juliette Reading about more land expropriation, more theft from somewhere that’s not here–Arizona to Modi’ India. Am not nostalgic for small production, I’m nostalgic for meaningful struggle against trans-national mega capital, thefts of agency and self- & communal-determination, as it intersects w/other work and struggle: a future. Here we are–JW’s dedication to force of rejection, that put the book in this informal circulation which I think is a good home. The sprit of this book is non-disclosure so I won’t try to chop it into an argument or quote, just register how we tangle: Beef-mandala & something about rendering. Animal-headed consumer emblems. cf Helen Adams’ collages / cf Duncan’s grand collage? Tho more despair here, the play w/scale as both exuberant and vertiginous and so much food, meat. I’d been thinking what are the recent poems not about consumer culture (something like Sprawl) but about actual consumption, the process of rendering. Here’s one. & whenever I think of beef, AR’s Cow pops up. “Lake Effect” / tho Josh moved to Denver, I’m thrilled w/any Rust-Lake belt call back.There’s a manifesto here RE: dada and surrealism where “surrealism” becomes a mantra and a fugue-y repetition between slice and circle.  Will leave it to you to find out. This ten minutes was better than any AWP. 12:24 PM

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Yalobusha Review #21: New Old Poems, New Old Book

Working through the language and form of these poems for five years. To me, they feel like one of Niedecker’s rocks in Lake Superior, registering geologically the time of their composition: the box age, the adjunct age, the traveling age, the ice age/buffalo. To you, who knows. **// automated labor–material, affective, reproductive, service, production, immaterial–//** I’ve got a lot of admiration for the power of rapid, proliferative writing and publishing. Can only hope whats become a glacial pace can become a sluggish friend to that kind of work.

Happy skimming off the poetry–reveling in:

Jessica B Weisenfels:

on the county line
to songs he wrote
on a mortgage I paid

Jeff Haynes:

why do fools fall in love
why do fools run the country
why did one summer you live entirely off ice

Katy Gunn:

With the amount of vaguely related information she could bring to mind, she could solve any number of constructed puzzles, weave in the loose ends of nearly any plot. Or she could not.

Michael Marburry:

Me (hive-mind and honey me)
and me like Golden Brosefs:
twin narcissus and emergent
boids, irreducible as densest

Josh Fomon:

 

To have a culpability. The dirty calm
striations. The sun hue struck

 

wisps in clouds. I had learned how to mouth my name.

 

Call this a way out.
Purdey Lord Kreiden

Trees fellated the wind, fire fellated the treetrunks, the wind fellated fire forests. Fire and trees aren’t enemies, but they’re competitive; each of them wants to show his devotion to the wind, and each of them wants to demonstrate his devotion to the wind is the greatest. To fellate To
be devoted
is their labor and only sin; this is how fire is made. Dangling porcelains, white and green
clouds, a bear who falls asleep with his hand in the pot of honey.

 

Dangling porcelains. Fellatios are given. A stem grows in front of me, everyday a little more,
like a violet alphabet of algae embedded in the waves of a lightly cruciform sea.
White and green clouds came

 

Then the nostalgia began

Sara Nicholson

All my love letters are written
in sans serif fonts.