From realpoetik at scn9.scn.org Sun Feb 7 15:46:45 2010 From: realpoetik at scn9.scn.org (RealPoetik Magazine) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 18:46:45 -0500 Subject: [Realpoetik] JARED STANLEY Message-ID: <86a3fe411002071546y5c77a69cxdd341fabf3a867b3@mail.gmail.com> * HAND HELD Hold your wits up to any light - you might see him. Hold your hand over page or screen over sheet or flag. Use a cinematic gesture. Obscure the gazelle-like information the dream data confers. You might seem forgotten. You might mistake him for seen. He’s having all his body parts returned to him via the imitation of something that doesn’t exist so he can reject all the other plain decorous effusions these lice, this night, these stars. Together, we could send letters up to the moon’s touch - a “p.” No, it lacks a certain severity salt in the groundwater reflected off the oceans off the diffuse brown moon. I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE THE PHYSICALITY OF MY LIGHT AT LEAST REMIND YOU Wind sets you free books set you free fun, it seems still. Oh fire, no, not yet, don't— brush me with your tunic. In my fingerless gloves blood squirts on my halo. Put your zealous face on. I'll have clouds shrouding my torso, thanks. There will now be some supernatural paper There will now be a miniature america. a split fig look seeds' nanosyllabic writing seeds' ubiquitous Victoriana. What to do about liberation?* * * * * * * *Jared Stanley* was born in Arizona and raised in California, where he lives to this day. He's the author of *Book Made of Forest* and the chapbooks *The Outer Bay*, *I Something Scott Inguito You* and *In Fortune* (w/Lauren Levin and Catherine Theis). He co-edits *Mrs. Maybe* w/Lauren and Catherine Meng. -- RealPoetik www.realpoetik.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From realpoetik at scn9.scn.org Sun Feb 14 13:06:42 2010 From: realpoetik at scn9.scn.org (RealPoetik Magazine) Date: Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:06:42 -0600 Subject: [Realpoetik] CHRISTINE HUME Message-ID: <86a3fe411002141306y65eaa85bv2ed9c3894e8a4556@mail.gmail.com> >From “The Saturation Project” (after Karlheinz Shockhausen’s *Hymnen* and David Hume’s “missing shade of blue”) Cadmium red: Because this is the color I imagine my living human insides to be—warm, muscular, and toxic—it is a color I have not yet fully experienced. Once upon a blotted-out time, cadmium was a magnetized pole of in-out. It remains an involuntary projection, a screen behind closed eyes instantaneously evoked when I imagine my gruesome death. Once my insides are brought to light—like an ancient fresco buried under a church floor—the color immediately disintegrates. Scarlet Lake: Swim in it all day, and get out glazed. You are sleeping or swimming, either way inside an ancient aquatic state. Fuck in the lake that dusk and pleasure shadows you but will not stay in your body as you walk home, side by side in a blue funk. Alizarin crimson: Dark, transparent trance of reading for the first time. My mind hot and frothy under the spell. When I look up from my book, my grandmother is holding a flashcard. The word in red. “I don’t know,” I say, “alizarin crimson.” She keeps holding it up, looking at me: “YET.” Vermilion: Intense red made from sulfur and mercury. Prone to turning black in sunlight. When one day I call my shirt “dusty rose,” my older brother insists it’s “vermillion.” I chalk it up to a version of male colorblindness until adults take his side. Even then, it took a paint swatch to convince me. My brother’s favorite color had always been blue, pitting his will against mine. How could it be that I failed to perceive the color I love best in the world? What is the corrective to see what I want? What is the treatment to see what’s there? What human affliction: the blindness toward affinity and love. Brick: It is a reserve red; one we know exists, but are saving for an emergency. Like all reds, it doesn’t lighten it pinks. If pinking shears minimize the fray, this red is the cruel radiance of afraid. To keep reading this piece, please continue to the RealPoetikwebsite. *Christine Hume* is the author of three books of poetry—most recently *Shot* (Counterpath, 2009). She is coordinator of the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University. Every Sunday at 8 p.m. (EST), she hosts Poetry Radio, which features contemporary and historic sound art, performance art, sound poetry, collaborations between writers and musicians, student work, audio narratives, and sound poetry. Today listen in for a special Valentine Day's show: http://www.emich.edu/studentorgs/wqbr/ or when you are more in the mood, listen to the podcast at iTunes U. -- RealPoetik www.realpoetik.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From realpoetik at scn9.scn.org Mon Feb 22 13:06:21 2010 From: realpoetik at scn9.scn.org (RealPoetik Magazine) Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:06:21 -0800 Subject: [Realpoetik] BRANDON BROWN Message-ID: <86a3fe411002221306o475ab849n563fa94627cc8837@mail.gmail.com> from the Poems Of Gaius Valerius Catullus XIV This boat you’re videotaping. You’re looking at a boat. Despite your protests that you are looking at a translation of the fourth poem in the corpus of Catullus, I assure you you are looking at this boat. Lots of bad things battered this boat. Forget about volunteering to swab its lintels. This boat denies it was minced in the Adriatic. It denies that it lit up the Cyclades with an all night buck and spill. Rhodes is horrible, noble, Thracian. Proponents of Rhodes call truce though might be their sinuses. Where this boat is is post-boat. The word for this boat is phaselus. A phaselus was a rather long and narrow vessel, named for its resemblance to a kidney bean. This boat was built for speed. Yet this boat is sort of fragile. Lots of bad things battered this boat from the beginning of its life to now. You state it’s cracked, but I tell you to go put your stupid hands in the water. Say it again. The boat frets about its impotence, falls over dead. The boat sucks lava dexterously; yes, this boat is right-handed. Its aura smokes cigarettes, looks up at Jupiter out there in space, and its beams moist. What happens below deck, and involves feet, stays below deck. I’m not literally pointing out this boat to you, I’m writing a poem about the boat in limping trimeters. But this is a fact: botulism is sad. Noobs lurch toward a limpid coast. And before them stands a boat, a beautiful old boat looking like a kidney bean built for speed. It sits there quiet and old, looking over the lake and thinking this lake is really limpid. The noobs all have twins. XVII Another so-so day in Colony City whose bridge was built for gamers, and whose bridge is inhabited by gamers. Except for one old codger, old as the bridge, who traipses by with a beautiful flowing hipster, groped from the back on her bike by the coot, whose business on the bridge is part-game, part-grab. Drool slides down his jowls but also ends up in his eyes. He’s blinded by saliva. The cougar coaxes pup into his claws and there is soft petting. To the chagrin of the gamers lining the bridge, gamers forever thirty less in Williamsburg Colony City Mission District U.S.A. chucking burned change at drunk Santa or screaming Lucy in the park. The crank goes puma, fondles the little lovely. Old dog head catches cat, claims to be a doctor for cat. And Catullus wants to catapult the fellow into the tender kidling. Just kidding. Catullus calls for the citizens to catapult the codger into the river. Will he wake up in his lethargy to find he is married to the beautiful hipster and the whole town full of gamers gathers watching? What is hipster runoff? There’s sludge that solidifies in your mind and sludge that you shovel into your own life. Catullus, laughing in Colony City. Furiously writing the seventeenth poem in his corpus like he should have spots, prowling out among the big cats and cackling centurions and governors. I came across this beautiful flannel-wearing hipster…the stress on your heart, old man, I just don’t think it’s worth it. *Brandon Brown* is a poet. In 2008, TAXT press published *Camels!* In 2010, he self published three chapbooks: *Tooth Fairy, The Orgy, *and *Your Mom's A Falconress and Other Poems.* He co-curated the *Performance Writing* series at New Langton Arts, *The (New) Reading Series* at 21 Grand gallery, and publishes small press books under the imprint OMG! -- RealPoetik www.realpoetik.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: