The Genius Genie

So I've been stuck in the autumnal cycle of self loathing lately. College (or as I've been ad nauseamly reminded "the best years of my life") is reaching it's almost-done point, and I frankly don't feel even close to half-baked. I've met amazing people with amazing intellects. I've seen the capacity for brilliance and its squander (usually Thursday nights...those are good squander nights). But what I haven't seen, or at least have been reluctant to see, is my own shiny light of smartness. I haven't really cornered the market on anything, and while that is a very liberating and renaissance achievement, it's left me a little more than dissatisfied. The couldahs are wafting in, and instead of actually, say, writing a thesis, or polishing a chapbook of poetry, I'm painting nice watercolors and vacuuming my carpet. I play the couldha game too much, and maybe that's why I'm a writer. Fantasizing about all those couldhas of all the possible personalities of my word is just plain addictive. Maybe that's my collegiate achievement--the ability to mess around in a highly imaginative environment. I'll probably miss college, but I'm going to exploit the hell out of it while I'm here.

This is all to say, of course, that a new poetry assignment is upon us: Write a poem with a voice a person's whose life and trajectory couldah been yours, but isn't. Try to draw outside the character box of your own selfhood. We're all genius genies--messing with what little magic we've got, but try to mess with someone else's mojo. Get into their box, become too familiar with that box, and then poetically explode it from within. I think I'll assume my biologist alter ego for this one. Let the life-play begin..

(geta)

you see these shackles, I’m your slave
through clawed talks, razor pony tail, braid,
I just keep losing my way.

No ring, no fucking promised day,
like booted soldiers, I take what I’ve got, this’ll
be my shackles, see, I’m your slave

again, like smoke to dirty lungs I stay
on my cute gold filter chain, though I bristle,
I just keep losing my way.

your wolf canines, vampiric, spay
my dick, of my throat render gristle,
you see these shackles? I’m your slave,

a copy atop normative copy on the day
you find me, pillow-shaped, forested, little,
just losing my way.

I am bitched, tamed, collar flayed
and screaming, blind through spittle,
you see these shackles, I’m your slave.
Can you help me find my way?

Dodge Draft

I'm just a man
triphopping from one ghost town,
on the new once again.

I didn't just walk I ran
from bar to prophylactic downtowns;
I'm just a man.

And would it be a problem if my name was Jan?
I was tired of those clowngowns--
on the new, once again...

This ain't Harold's crayon
it's a full on noun.
I'm just a man

whoring what I can
or will before I'm down,
on the new once again.

To hell with the straight plan
you can keep your crown.
I'm just a man,
on the new once again.






**So instead of taking 2 consecutive lines (which I didn't even consider when I wrote the assignment), I've taken a line from My Love and All Over Again...slant rhyme totally counts. Can't beat that shit.

Other boys

Them other boys don't know how to act,
those broken hearted boys with fists of spun gold
Those motherfuckers don't know how to act.

Some boys swallow guilt, spit blood, choke
on insincerity, fucking what is convenient, old
them other boys don't know how to act

but I flourish under blacklight, snort poetry in coke
form, speak from the poise of gentle knight, valiant bold:
Those motherfuckers don't know how to act,

and we get bad wraps, the punchy coat tails of popular jokes,
palms bared for slapping, we cry out when elders scold,
"Them other boys don't know how to act!"

What's left to speak of those boys, that hasn't been spoke
three, fifteen times until the memorized refrain holds:
Those motherfuckers don't know how to act.

We are those boys of youth, of one breed, of shared yolk
vagabonds until given time to regret and unfold -
Them other boys don't know how to act
Those motherfuckers don't know how to act.



+ Alesia, I don't know how I'll forgive you for forcing a justin timberlake line into a villanelle. It's like fitting a warhead into a clown car and hoping for the best. This is the resulting tripe.

New Assignment, Punks

Since no one is listening to my borrowed poem assignment, I have a new one. Write a villanelle!! Lord only knows I completely ignore everything old school. And I shouldn't. It's time to itch out of our comfort zones. I want to be a masquerader of the lyric, of the Imagists, and yes, even of the villanelle. And I want to rock it. And so do you ..?
Here's the real kicker though: the "refrain" has to be a line from JT's Futuresex/Lovesounds. So go forth: exploit, create, pun, riff the hell out of it...mine will be up oh so soon..

(for an extra sexytime, check out Dylan Thomas reading his very own villanelle)

Next Assignment! a borrowed poem of sorts:

On Opening Up a Norton, and Finding a Random Poem (Special thanks to Shakespeare, via Sonnet 20)

Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion--
wrote the roses, aligned the times?
You spit wit like Bailey ran his circus, and your face
a woman's face, with nature's own hand painted
is ugly to the touch.

Your coat rack of wigs, nutmegged and cinnamoned
for the daily dressing, always taunting
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
with history, the arts of liturgy.

The refinements of toast and tea and opium
dens are really enough for me, but I love
a good bang--
With shifting change, as false women's fashion;

I am the pimp
Daddy and you are painted whore, lucky enough to have
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
but your tempests were remakes and sequels, stealing &

gliding the object whereupon it gazeth;
You curve canonically, demonically around
the shape of our younger years.
Putting into doctrine
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,

correcting the miscreant, bracing the book & the back
I learned the game of blush, the kill
with pallor
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.

And for a woman wert thou first created,
it'd be a hell of a lot easier
to get to the grocery store.

As for now, our nails and hair are glued
to the margins, pasted for a day
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
insanity has its perks.

And by addition me of thee defeated
we will feel no loss and suffer no gain
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

I am sure you will continue
the reverberation, stultifying the sparrows with
'But since she pricked thee out of women's pleasure,'
and the rest, but I will also continue

to abuse your pages with rough delicacy,
find falsity with coterie
until sore with refuse:
Mine by thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

Person I Know Assignment Thing

Funeral Rites

Peering over the fashionable box
an aperture, just wide enough for comparison
opens. My hand: taut-smooth, wound
from circus tight ropes. Hers: threatens
unsound architecture, and I am amazed they ever wanted
to perform at all.

She palsied across piano keys maintaining a concert
perfection, and I was also very perfect at turning the pages
making them breathe across her face. The fine hairs quivered then
suspend, mid-thought, waiting for the next chord.

The scene was electric, and my body found its way
jolted to paralysis.

On this day death
has its revelry, but my hands don’t look right.

Feigning consternated prayer, I coerce my skin back
in place. This smooth patch under a finger.
That rough patch where I forgot scissors are sharp two Mondays ago.
With horror I realize I am

a thing entombed and
my Hatshepshut hands
can only clap with glee.

My mind is mummifying outwards
to my body, and I cannot lay in the tomb with her.
I am glad not to have to walk beside her:
to have to sit at her feet and rub the dust in my eyes.

An impossibility of the physics of preservation.
How can her skin, which melts and drips away
from her bones house the same fury
mechanism in me?

I refuse to lay beside her, to sit at her feet, to perfume
her rotting skin in my youth. This must be contagious.

And as my knees collapse
unknowingly, definitively, beside her
I inhale the dust of her divinity and
her paper lips smile

the fetishist dies in a new york bathroom

facedown in a urinal, body slack and sex
rigid. The blood rush doesn't comprimise
the evidence drip, evidenced on the prick
tip, wet with one last hurrah. The cock forgets

to die sometimes, pantomiming life like
the brain does daily. The fetishist's smile
takes on water, logging the pleasure-still
instant where it all came together.

An experiment: me, writing about actual people

Bad-ass Florence Bender

[first view: sassy flo (really, I’m related to a Florence Bender)]

Flo, you beautiful fucker,
hooknose like a crook, shepherd
leopards with trainsets and crisps.
underwear, paisley printed, still speaks to
me through centuries of scrapbooking.

Killer kink in
your knitting, say it with a hard K please,
because Great-Grandma Bender died of
a cervical canker

give the woman her fucking
cue – give her kites to climb to convalescence.

[second view: train-bender, mind-render]

like twin mounted engines, your camel humpshoulders
assault my eyes like color insults

black and white. your face waters, like a million
pennies spinning crushed through air,

secreting from the rails, syrup from a maple.
your bits and pieces, in separate boxes they

lay. keep the watermelon in the cistern. keep

the unreal in the oven. keep the indulgence in

the panties.

even after the fact, like like brother charlie, I
find hidden longing in your kitchen, baked into
crusts, slowly being crushed between the twin
cakes: poetry, patriarchy.

New Assignment: Pick a poem...any poem...

There's been some talk about plagiarism. Good. For this assignment, I want you to react to something on this blog. It doesn't necessarily need to be a poem, hell - it doesn't necessarily need to be coherent. I want reactions, explosions of lyricisms, madness, etc. etc. We know what I what, I want you both.

In a little experiment with context, I want you to obscure the source material. Chop it up, Burroughs it, gargle and spit brilliant.

I have faith.

I have nothing BUT faith.

-B.

ps. I don't care if you chop your own shit up or someone else's, but for the sake of adventurous-ness, you should probably try for something outside your own head. Also, feel free to take potshots at the comments of any particular post or incorporate them if you're working with the post they were in reaction to. (I hope that makes sense)

The First topic, I'm catching up boys..

they come from everywhere

sauntering, never swaying, she walks to me
her mouth cotton

candy style and her hair blown up big
because hair spray smells better than the blood they give you on Halloween
and she walks to me and says she’d like to know
how to get to the bottom of the hill
where the man with the big arms serves the big girls
those papercup drinks.

I nod and know and of course I give
her directions and of course I smile
because we’ve been taught to nod to that beat of direction
giving and kindness to strangers
but not the ones with candy.

I’m telling her something like
the boys down the street, if you say Jimmy Jingles
well they’ll give you a shot for free
and she’s not saying anything other than that uh huh
which means everything more than Gothic windows on Sunday

of course
not this Sunday. I’m bouncing
pressing cider
into the palm of my pointed hand, pulping up for the big show

LBPBG: Bendi's version

jump hearted, broken started.

I can't be cleverer cuz he knows
like, every-thing ever - no duh.
Like which rangers could kick butt
best, and forget to take prisoners.

I wanna be cleverer, cuz he makes
me think he's my only friend when

he grins, I lend out my very rarest
x-men cards and get them back and
count the finger prints. He's mine

until the years shear the feeling
down to its essential parts. Miguel
is mine only in the memorabilia, so

cards become caveats and feints
with you, ever the difficult saint
of lost things, of lost hearts, of
anything that fingers take apart.


+ Question: How much should a poem exist outside of its context?

LBPBG: Jon Version

the wind is a strange freak, now.

cavity cat-fight in a canine
tooth, I press leaves onto
my caramel apple like corn
on a cob. I hide slugs in the
candy corn, to steal away salt.
I can declare certainty, for all
time, in Luke Skywalker and
Jim Kelly and jack-o-lanterns.

fall’s pretty, sorta, if
you block it out. leaves
like gothic Murakami,
little veiny faces squinting
plunging into void with jaundice.

fall’s
fucked up,
fire hearth and
football. freaky-deaky
wind with a
bow in her hair and a
bulge in her pants plays
popsy-pumpkin with punks,
hiding beneath the bleachers,
waiting for whimsy like Godot.

I read Sharon Olds in the concrete
steps of a library so I can feel
that devil clawing up inside,
steaming against my hoodie.

I look on, like a relic, staring at a world
drenched in sepia rainbows, wondering
which button gets me back

to black and white.

A Vaguely LPPBG Poem

Since I'm a plagiarizer by trade, this is a poem I kind of reworked to fit the assignment suggestion. I want to do orgasm, but I can never find time for those sorts of things these days. Soon though.. very soon.

Ars Poetica #1: On Titles that Are Too Long and Teachers who Edit Too Much

“Mrs. Poo—
diak, I got a question, a question about that letter” This letter, have a question
now let’s get to business:

Your assignment is to write a letter to your pen
pal from Mexico. He or She speaks English like
you. Only write one page only and in only
cursive. Don’t forget to print neatly, spell
right, and be nice. Tell the other student all
about your life in America. Your favorite
foods, television shows, things to do after
school. Remember to have fun!

So you spell my name like, and I guess
you say it too Ah-

lee-
sha (That means Alesia, which is my name)
Care-(like I care about
you)Oh- (like o)-Sell (Like I sell girl scout
cookies)-EE (like me). (That means Caroselli, which is
my name?

A too quick swipe of the red
pen, and she is stunned to
rebellion. Bringing in artilleries
of white security envelopes and
momdad pens from momdadd desks,
V becomes Mollify and the Princess
only sometimes finds the pea.

Experiment/Assignment #2

In a brief poem, move from a state of immaturity to a state of full maturity. This can be reflected via maturation of images, a syntactical movement from young to old, chronicling of a life, etc.

The length requirement is fluid, but the idea is to accomplish sweeping maturation (of whatever form you choose) in a concise space. If it's syntactically decadent, that's great - the concision refers only to the physical space of the poem.

we shall refer to this exercise as the "lil boys pushin' big grills" experiment, or the LBPBG. because it's funny.

for OCD's sake, when you publish yours, do "LBPBG: [your name here] version." so when we search through things, it's easy to decipher.

Poem Experiment #1: Bendi's Version

Quick note - the experiment was to write a poem which captured the kinetic/emotional drive of an orgasm from start to finish. [Sorry if it's less palpable than yours, "Jojo". AD, you in on this? -B.]


filia -

I'd like to place Occam's razor
in the candied apples, to cut
the fat places in my family ties,
betwixt muscle and bone, where

old wounds calcify. I'd say, 'simple
is best, Mom' and we'd smiling
slice away rock-hard grudges from
both lineage and lymph -

to begin we'd incise,
our methods precise

to the blood drop, nothing done in
errancy, photos cropped, excellent
photoshopped memories mass made
in absentia, the maudlin goes missing
from albums, only marmalade sweet
sunday snapshots make it in-


yet


if the engineering is genetic
in the discretion lies the sin.

Why Writing a Thesis is so Hard

For one thing, I love the world and everything is too inherently interesting. For another thing, I may have an incurable form of literary ADD. If I can move from a formalist poet who in nearly every poem hails back to "the Bigs" (I'm talking about Dana Gioia and his love for common mythology and BIG important authors like Flaubert and Rilke) to evolutionary theory and how Darwin's Origin of the Species was like a soft opening of a Vegas Strip Joint..something must be wrong.. or terribly right.

I'm writing (or preemptively writing about writing) a thesis on the authorial mask. The protean switch-up between biography, speaker, author, person, persona, gender, race, whatever. Huge topic, right? Well, fear not, my base is John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs...which scares the crap out of me. The guy's been my hero (and antagonist) for 4 years now. It's probably high time I write about him, then again, every time I start to think about him critically, I get bogged down, freak out a bit, and start reading Richard Dawkins. Well, Life, Friends, is Boring, and I'm just going to go for it. To hell with convention, I'm writing an genetically, literary, John Berrymanian thesis that'll be great. Take that, English Department.


PS- I'm going to post a review on Dana Gioia's Interrogations at Noon real soon.

Poem experiment #1, as assigned by Bendi

3.5:

[wine/candles/a real stand up kind of dude]

navigating by touch is dangerous in a knife fight,
so take the snake tongue glare with a sense
of delicate balance. a dance, not death. think of
handles resting between palm lines, a filled alcove,
touch so light feathers give goosebumps. a chink in
the armor where skin used to be. knife fights are
romantic to knife-fight writers, so think about metal
nuzzling metal, two steel Charlemagnes resting in
in the other’s crook. hilts that won’t stop. circling,
dancing, for the possibility of pain. Two tongues
reaching, extending, expanding, never touching. Even
flesh can build on pain.

[expansion by concision]

veins: because blood accrues in tubes.
the wildflowers of sensory experience
dictate that skin is like tissue paper,
pretty decorative stuffing, except on the outside.
skin is fat to a steak, skin is thick
and precisely itself. It is not strange, it is not fresh,
it cannot wine and dine. Skin cannot rhyme, because
skin has no rhythm, skin could not dance
to “killing me softly,” even if anyone else could. Skin
is not sawdust to a workbench, it is sawdust to a floor,
wet, hoppy, ill-mannered cellulose. It is wrapped on tubes,
accrued like tar to a seagull. Sit still-
feel this sawdust sopping me: feel this thickness.

[rough, like cowboy rough/like a rentboy on fire island/ like Jubes’ Drag Show Explosion]

our dialogue is concussive, our contours
and cartography make holes like Kalamata olives
shot through cardstock. We are it, James Deans on
fingertouch subways, shooting whatever it is
that Dean shoots like fucking prize winning Palamino
studs. we speak like a map directs – we’re always
goddamn right on, our fonts sing like shot rooster, we
are pure escalation, copied and de-authored. undocumented,
we dress in high heels and matching flannel, we exist
imprecisely and unconcise in phonetic fleshwrap. feeling through words
like a worm through soil, we fucking erupt, sucking,
desperate, hungry, for that great goddamn light.

[“We’re meant to be active beings”/uuuuaaaa…/similies for sex/haiku for handjobs]

like spigots shooting
glass peppermint shards piercing
giant musk bottles

as if metal clamps
needed nipples, as if lube
needed vaginas

we are not flowers,
plants are always wicked lame.
we are leg sore gods

rising to the peak
with frostbitten cuticles,
engorged, greasy laps.

[the hedonist mantra/BAM!/apocatastasis]

with greasy knuckles I rap out my song on the
keyboard: xdzklj jj m,.

with overclocked pituitaries, screaming “fuck you, heaven!”

with unconscious fingers, quietly bliss typing.

[the appetitive comedown]

I can see with my fingers;
the way apples see Magritte

So I shaved my head tonight...

It's bizarre how dependent my body is on little ticks. Maybe like really good crack, or better yet, like a really dependable poet...I look for meandering lines, sexy metaphors, even a kickass epigraph before I read.

I touch my head while I write, before I say something that requires thought, even while I'm drinking (water, get your heads out of that gutter). There isn't hair to twist anymore in writerly consternation. Even the wind, which I thought I understood, is a strange freak now.

One thing that I've learned in the past three hours is that I used hair as a mask. It was nice to hide behind my mane.. even when it was short, I would shake my head and let some of it fall forward. Embarrassment, frustration, adoration: anything and everything could be disguised. Not anymore...in fact, my girlish ticks look silly now. My head is shiny, and so are my thoughts, and maybe my writing will spice up as well. Or maybe I'll just keep rubbing my head like the cueball it is.