what i'm reading (070714)

The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan by Ted Berrigan
The Self-Dismembered Man by Guillaume Apollinaire (trans. Revell)
A Place in Space by Gary Snyder
Paterson by WCW
....
and for my mental health
Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
and
Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl

::self//portrait::

stands left

foot planted

other foot

tiptoed brown

leather shoes

left beige

plastic chair

metal legs

wooden floor

half lightened

fades less

light shins

quarter lit

half shadowed

string blue

Christmas lights

appear right

fall bright

light raises

too bright

light straight

where pinned

place falls

again soft

curve rises

other pin

            disappears red

brown plaid

shirt appears

again elbow

briefly disappears

projector screen

peeks again

disappears again

projector

well that's no fun

honey my heart

is a basket

of endless

laundry

for u

each beat knits

previously

worn socks

or bleach

spotted

tees

did you get it?

the part

about how my heart is

a basket of laundry?

it’s a self-deprecating metaphor.

comedy snare drum

and cymbalism

Open Letter Review of Tim Earley's "Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery"

Tim,

             

I’d like to begin with a thank you for your time and insights, for sharing them with me and my peers. It was a real and genuine joy.

            

Tim, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery  is nothing short of hell-bent string band operatic. My buddy Sam read your poems aloud to the car on a daytrip to Black Mountain. How could he not raise his voice? These poems demand it. I must inspire within myself the brimstone vocality of a Primitive Baptist preacher, declaring: “I will kill you with the pivet of my cycling drum. I will kill you with the electric mouth of the sea.” 

So much motion in these poems. They teem with cycles and yonders. If these poems were an animal (and they are) they’d be a mouthful of protozoa. As I read them I get a sense of the activity of language occurring on a microscopic level. I think of how poetry is “its own microcosm, its own system of bastard hermetics.” A poet has no need, nor power to give life to a living language. I see a poet can only round it up (a real rodeo), put it under a microscope and watch it squirm.

           

Your poems are not all slime and shotgun shells. There are moments of real tenderness nestled in the violence. A favorite moment of mine: “A dead swallow sleeps in my brain. An angel sleeps next to the dead swallow. My dead uncle Adolphus Clementine Medina sleeps next to the angel.” These poems have a way of ending quietly, as sometimes life is quiet. It allows for a step-back, a moment of recollection akin to picking oneself off the ground and dusting off. Even in the grotesque some real beauty exists. I couldn’t forget the song of monkey-boy Richard Antwire. His death, brought about by “a variety of shame,” seems of little importance as he sings: “the green grasses, the green grasses, the miracle of sawdust particles arrayed in light at the planning mill…”  I am reminded that the ability to see the miracles of the ordinary are often gifted to those on the fringes, to the outsiders.

             

And speaking of outsiders, you make me feel like one. I can’t get enough. I don’t think I’ll ever know the definitions to words like cortullux, kildee, or histacured, but I question if I want to at all. The inventive language in these poems put a foreign country in dem dar hills. It looms in the rational part of the brain like a cornerstore Jabberwock. Thank you for these poems.

sinffectionately yrs,

Con.

put you in the car

convo w/ sam listening to car stereo

hey        ask me who this is

              who is this no ask

me who we’re listening to

who are we listening to—

NOTHING which reminds me

of a story my dad would say

his mom would say to him

and his friend who are you

listening to and they’d say

GUESS WHO

who

Haa Haa Haa

GUESS WHO

who

Huh Huh Huh

((en route to Black Mt Nc

62014))

we went to see the old Black Mt College campus on Lake Eden, but it's a camp for christian boys now...i tried to imagine Charles Olson ziplining down into the water, making a large splash, or Creeley and Cage playing foosball underneath the studies building as Josef Albers nearby lifted weights, but it didn't feel right. after walking around hands-in-pockets for about ten minutes, a fellow who i can only assume was the camp director suggested that we ought to leave. he seemed pretty disappointed that we were uninterested in becoming camp counselors. some Eden...

we fell into Asheville a half/hour later. ate fancy burgers. went to the BMC museum, very humble, only a room. this was perhaps the pilgrimage we were searching for.

on the way home it rained off and on off and on off and on

lifegoal or pterrorism

a little tongue-in-cheek, a little sincere, kinda my thing.

i thought this would be an appropriate "first blog poem"

enjoy. 

lifegoal or pterrorism

by connor childers

to become famous poet to become the beauty of the face of language

to aquire commission

          from sincerely, mr & mrs president

poems carved

word for word along the trees of hyper-

          real PANOMERICARAMIC highway:

                  

Rhododendron~MoonLight~Seven/Eleven~Romance~We~Flew~a~Common~Day~etc.

to sit on scenic overlook distracted cars

          crash & bash

fly-over the railing faces with pensive brain

contortion

          defogging binoculars, slow-like

face fireball aglow

          shedding a sweaty eye.

just lock me up already