I am so filled with despair as the time grows near when she will come and I have not even begun to make a decision about what I will offer her. I am so afraid I will fall back on the Kartoffel Surprise, and it’s no surprise to her anymore. I mustn’t, I mustn’t.
from Writing is Never By Itself Alone: Six Mini-Essays On Relational Investigative Poetics
Currently in the U.S.A., the practice of intellectual analysis seems like an act of defiance. Fundamentalist logic pervades and is being used to justify many domestic and foreign policy decisions—from the notion that poverty can be controlled through faith-based initiatives, to establishing the parameters of an “axis of evil” that threatens “freedom.”
Declaration of Energy Independence
Dear Friend,
There is nothing patriotic about handing over our natural heritage to the oil industry. But that’s exactly what the White House wants to do in the name of national security.
Eat, Grab Tit, Piss: A Conversation Between Joe Wenderoth and Sandy Brown
This instant messenger conversation took place on two occasions in late January of this year.
(Fri Jan 26 23:39:11 2001):
Joe Wenderoth: I am here, and I am queer.
Sandy Brown: I am here, and I am unwilling to comment on my queer/not-queer status. So. What is up with all of the beatings mentioned in Letters to Wendy’s?
Laura Riding to the World: “What Shall We Do?”
Poet Laura (Riding) Jackson is probably more famous for her renunciation of poetry than for her writing of it. In 1938, her Collected Poems was published when she was only thirty-seven, though she lived another fifty-four years, twenty of them without publication at all.
Landscapes without End
Clouds can archive. My fantasy is a landscape. Sometimes I daydream about merging my body with my computer so that I can more fully enter the landscapes of Google Earth, lush surface world without pollution or traffic, planet seen from the vantage point of space and roving surveillance vehicles, a motionless field, magnifying the normal […]
What’s African American About African American Poetry?
In November 2000, the Poetry Society of America and The New School sponsored a panel bringing together five writers—Elizabeth Alexander, Cornelius Eady, Tracie Morris, and Harryette Mullen, along with moderator Kevin Young—to consider the question “What’s African American about African American Poetry?” The event expanded upon a similar conference sponsored by the same pair of institutions in 1998, which asked, “What’s American about American Poetry?” (See Fence Vol. 2, N. 1, Spring/Summer 1999).
Symposium on Subjectivity and Style
There is a Zen koan which asks, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” The answer is neither yes nor no, but the single Japanese word mu, which means “enough.” In other words, stop analyzing; the interrelationship of self and selflessness cannot be grasped through mental exertion alone.
So Now You Know
So now you know places in the Universe exist
where a million years elapse
as a second passes
simultaneously for us
and vice versa.
from The Tales of Horror
PASTORAL INTERLUDE Our patient sleeping at last, I have come out into the garden bringing this novel with me: I do not think they will think of looking for me here, and I shall be able, perhaps, in these stolen moments, to get down, on the copyright page or the blank flyleaf or crushed in the margins, my impressions of recent events and order my all-too-scattered thoughts. It is crucial I think clearly, I know that, now more than ever, and yet my mind will stray . . . ; how tall these walls of green are!