Written By H’Self

BY TYRONE WILLIAMS

 

The signature public
the only avant-garde
behind invention

wheelchairs (in) “the street.”
Type (A) bleeds through the page—
or screen—it becomes—

a pool as it we’re
one drop rules(.)
Individual talent

divides tradition
into tithes, tenths
and nationalized tribes—

catch-as-catch-can
market share erosion.
Staggered Lees

piggyback the Gap.
John Henry—busted by Keaton.
Gentlemen, ‘e thinks,

as the bespoken,
it was the other
kind of happy

feet I wanted.
Guess these shoes
will have to have.

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Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

BY MURIEL RUKEYSER

 

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
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Movement Song

BY AUDRE LORDE

I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck
moving away from me
beyond anger or failure
your face in the evening schools of longing
through mornings of wish and ripen
we were always saying goodbye
in the blood in the bone over coffee
before dashing for elevators going
in opposite directions
without goodbyes.
Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof
as the maker of legends
nor as a trap
door to that world
where black and white clericals
hang on the edge of beauty in five oclock elevators
twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh
and now
there is someone to speak for them
moving away from me into tomorrows
morning of wish and ripen
your goodbye is a promise of lightning
in the last angels hand
unwelcome and warning
the sands have run out against us
we were rewarded by journeys
away from each other
into desire
into mornings alone
where excuse and endurance mingle
conceiving decision.
Do not remember me
as disaster
nor as the keeper of secrets
I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars
watching
you move slowly out of my bed
saying we cannot waste time
only ourselves.
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Joanne Kyger

“And here is the crux of the matter: Kyger resists “letting go” of experience with all her might at the same time that her Buddhist training and practice counsel detachment. What is at stake in the poems is more than the plums she’s eating, or a dream in which Gary Snyder appears: it’s a vigilant exploration of the nature of consciousness in which the particulars of experience — light filtering through the clouds, a neighbor’s note, surfers waiting for waves — bridge the gap between inner and other worlds. Across six decades of writing, these careful attentions to consecutive moments collectively constitute a massive humanist document, of which On Time is the latest installment. Reading Kyger is not like reading about a life so much as perceiving what it’s like to really live.”

Joanne Kyger: The Poet-Buddhist-Ecologist Combo You Should Know

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Resist Much Obey Little

“Resist Much signifies the strength of a literate and politically conscious America, which will not be duped by the mountebank tactics and the empty rhetoric of politicians.  As Whitman would affirm, it is up to writers, governments, and households alike, to brace themselves against “the eminence of meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indecency, impotence, lust.” Buy this book today, read it, and spread the word. Resist.”

Zero at the Bone: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance

 

resist much

 

Order from Spuyten Duyvil

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2017

by Adam Malinowski

 

“2017” 

we are making so. much. noise. hearing only our own distraction and meaningless chit-chat to listen to the scream of a world on the edge of complete destruction. like how david says, just a few days ago, in a cramped backseat on the 405 in LA, the cars all stacked on top one another , that the only response we can muster to complete & total ecological destruction is the perfection of self. Every day i wish we could just stop, yet the myth of this i is destroyed only in finite moments, moments that are still indescribable to me, and so in these poems the i remains as an artifact of this self, an artifice for all that constitutes it—people, affect, memory, & place—all of which are political and fucked, all of which are not mine, all of which i know so beautifully intimately.

 

 

 

i want to sleep with you in 2008
at the beginning
of the first term
when we were
all full of blind optimism
and courage
concerning the scope
of the country’s history
well fuck this country
tho i love
this lake
we are near
yr parent’s place
where we have kissed & the icy sheets
—water, manufactured heat, exhaust—
how all the resources of the world
still can’t bring me closer to you.

 
[…]

 

eyes become eyes
yours & yours
a spell cast
to ward off
fucked up neo
-liberal death
tell ‘em
we want
cacophonies
because we are dying

& if you were at the lake
w/ me
if there were trains full
of people at the park
in the middle
of the lake or if all
the walkers
or workers
had spoken words
of protest
we still
wouldn’t know
who’s suffering
until we value
a motion
like the man who
walked his little dog
& how he came up to me
i was dreaming or something
in this little sketchbook
here in my hands &
he has his little dog &
me my long hair &
i’m all like leave me
alone old man i’m here
with my feelings
and i like it that way
but what a warm one
leather jacket & hat
what kinds of hats are those?
shining in salmon sun & i can
his figure in still-windsor light
the bridge he gets a call on
says he’s right down
the street on jefferson
& i’m envisioning him steer
his little cadillac away out of here
that dog in the front seat
we walk down the rocks, however,
to drink from frozen water
where it opens up
river to lake
near your parent’s house or
grosse point that apartheid city
where the water’s cleaner i’m sure
of it and how they’re sick
much as we are like governments
determine
who gets what where and how
& the walkers
or workers
on the island
are having a ball
women in scarves
taking wedding photos
men grilling up cow meat
bathrooms smell
& the leaves rot
& the leaves rot dry
& winds blown north to mom’s
into the northern lake
past all my old selves
in their old clothes, old sneakers
out in the county next
drunk and here is
the impossibility of guilt
never not entering the poem
i’ll always write the poem
as a path to love
this instance on the island
were you there we would sing
under dying trees
frigid sky & industrial waterway
blessed to be eyes
become eyes. yours
and yours. mine
and mine.

 

 

Our conversation at the kitchen table in Hamtramck, Katie, makes me want
answers
of how to touch
the space between my body & the meaning i make out of personal histories and the material fabric of a history infinitely larger than this self alone

next to me is a silver can of coors light
this can is not mine
i have put forth no labor into its construction
but i have touched its aluminum with my calloused fingertips
& drank its fluid
and thru some abstract economic arrangement almost entirely occulted
from sight i have come to acquire its boozy contents

& yet there is only the present
the can beside me, idle
on a tapestry i use as a nightstand cloth bought for me by a past love
for my old ypsilanti studio
across from me davey and david sit on a black and gray plaid quilt
the walls all marigold yellow—a koi fish poster drapes itself atop their noses

outside soaked in frozen rain dripping brown the concrete world is chemically
depressed

salt mined underneath the city by those we do not know drips in chunks from
the carports north of here

the precipitation is melting leaving behind various car wastes: oil slick, green
antifreeze, gasoline near the entrance ramp by my dads

selves extinguish alarmingly fast here

on these shoulders trees wilt in winter when the sun shines only twice a year,
near the highway where we had your nose stitched up one july

near my grandparents grave

near neon fish in acid rain ponds

near apple cider and donuts and orange hoodies in fall

near green antifreeze love
davey and david sit across from me

in this room there is you
in orange hooded sweatshirt
& flannel union made underpants

we met here before the organic markets
somewhere under blue fluorescent lab lights

this is not important however.

these days were pre-political
although the buzz of the war
was all around and the news reports
echoed in on a 32” box
under an east facing suburban bedroom
window in early spring 2003
& my dad put up a sign
STOP BUSH
in the front lawn

still
this is not important.

the dead cows all lined up for easy disposal on school grounds

whatever it was was all around

whatever it was was all around.

 

 

melancholic objects

 
this poetry wrapper

it speaks like someone loves you

leaves you a voicemail

the old fashioned way

she says you should

learn to swim out loud

like otters and trees

Spicer’s mammals we salute

somewhere in the valley

beneath the smog outline

of the poem. Sun panic.

highways cry softly in night

cars stretched out each direction

Interrupted, I take a walk

my heart weighs heavy

on the impossibility

of loving

in 2017.

 

 

“News” “Conference” or Play Your T. Card

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Deep Listening As An Act of Resistance

by LAURA WETHERINGTON

 

In the days and weeks following the latest U.S. election, poetry listicles began to mushroom. It’s clear that we look to poetry in times of crisis. It’s also clear why: The poems that have been emerging offer inspiration, hope, resolve, a sense of history, and the spirit of resistance. Poetry reminds us that we are a strong community. “There is always a way through the ‘Wall,’” Juan Felipe Herrera states in the introduction to Boston Review’s chapbook Poems for Political Disaster. Literature celebrates our individual and collective lives. Edwidge Danticat, in “Poetry in a Time of Protest,” says of the inaugural speech that it “was dark, rancorous, unnuanced” and that “afterward, I wanted to fall into a poet’s carefully crafted, insightful, and at times elegiac words.” In addition to acting as a mirror, poetry can function as a window into experiences we haven’t had. As Don Share reminds us: “It’s a way of listening. When you’re reading a poem, you’re listening to what someone else is thinking and feeling and saying.” Poetry puts us in someone else’s shoes in order to find out that we’re not that different after all.

READ MORE HERE at 1508 Blog

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Kindness

by  Naomi Shihab Nye

 
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
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