Boss

Un-Other World

Thesis time approaches. Have you ever taken a sink-shower in the second floor bathroom of Brown University's Literary Arts Department?

 Me neither.


I wrote this poem after teaching last week. The first word is taken from the title of a student poem, and the next line from my own teacherly ramblings.

NECESSARY WORLD

Un-ease has

the “ease” still in it—

as in blankets,

as in what

would the ocean be

if no one

could see it—

if we said let’s take

a line out or

a boat out

and were lost

at the suggestion

.

Practical Advice

Hello World

Due to a long spell of bloggy silence and nothing much to write, here is a poem i just made out of an older, longer poem. This is something I've been doing for a while now. The recipe is this: read old drafts, take out something that seems to work, fiddle with it till it's passably coherent, find a theme, and title it "(insert theme here) World." Bang. This one arose from the primordial sludge of a two-year-old draft, which contains a line I wrote in 2002.

NEIGHBOR WORLD


No one recognized it,
least of all myself,
having been raised
in the city where
the houses come
in vinyl close together,
and the neighbors burn
their leaves in barrels
on a Sunday or
a Saturday,
and at such times
our size in opposition
to the barrels
can’t exactly be
ignored, since we
are barrel-sized
at times and have
our own vanishings.

Useful Knowledge

Here is the actual ringtone, from pennsound.

Yo Yo Mr Such My Hand

I just started using Google voice, which transcribes all my voice messages and sends them to me in email form. Basically it's the latest version of the game “telephone.” Only better.

"A"

New Directions just released a new edition of Louis Zukofsky's "A." I'm reviewing it for MAKE, which has spurred me to finally read the entire book in its 800 page entirety. It's totally worth it.