James Tate

The List of Famous Hats

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Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all honesty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The first one isn't even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up--well, he didn't really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pinhead at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that beneath his public head there was another head and it was a pyramid or something. 

Tao Lin

 

thirteen of twenty-four

notice how my forehead approaches you at a high speed

notice the contortions on my face; hear and feel the impact

of my forehead against your eyebrow

never get angry if someone doesn’t do things for you

react to disappointment by being quiet and nice

and alone, not by being confrontational or frustrated

in 1952 a DSM copy-editor removed ‘headbutting’

from the entry for ‘psychopathic behavior’

thereafter the headbutt has thrived

across all social, political, and elementary school gym classes

today the headbutt is a sign of friendship, stability, and inner calm

the exponential effect of your repeated lies makes me afraid what will happen

to us; ‘the perfect headbutt’ destroys both participants and impresses

even the severely disillusioned, and the phrase ‘giant poem’ reverberates

through my head with the austerity of ancient ruins, the off-centered beauty

of repressed veganism, and the lord of the rings trilogy

I forgot what this poem was about

 

Andrew Zawacki

 

Into the Field: Andrew Zawacki

INTO THE FIELD, hosted by Stephen McLaughlin

[Grayscale breath on a fluid...]

Grayscale breath on a fluid

field, with lo-fi

                 rainpatter—petrol blue—,

                                a 60-watt sun uns

-crewed from the

woebegone sky: rip-

                              ­rap & coal slurries,

       dragline & loess, what phosphor

-us is a semaphore

for, silklike

                       in its acoustic shadows

                             louver away, or stay

when I move:

figures astray from the mercury

                        dark—shatterproofless,

                                   shutterproofless,

image noise

stressing each contour to

                                                    strass—

                         as if the margins were

swarming with

centers, or cinders

                                           —"Ecchoes

                                           to the Eye" —

or Cinderella's slipper

blown of poly­-

                                      vinyl butyral

                             & laminated glass

Carl Phillips

 

Brothers in Arms

The sea was one thing, once; the field another. Either way,

something got crossed, or didn’t. Who’s to say, about

happiness? Whatever country, I mean, where inconceivable

was a word like any other lies far behind me now. I’ve

learned to spare what’s failing, if it can keep what’s living

alive still, maybe just

                                       awhile longer. Ghost bamboo that

the birds nest in, for example, not noticing the leaves, color

of surrender, color of poverty as I used to imagine it when

I myself was poor but had no idea of it. I’ve always thought

gratitude’s the one correct response to having been made,

however painfully, to see this life more up close. The higher

gods having long refused me, let the gods deemed lesser

do the best they can — so a friend I somewhere along the way

lost hold of used to drunkenly announce, usually just before

passing out. I think he actually believed that stuff; he must

surely, by now, be dead. There’s a rumored

                                                                               humbling effect

to loss that I bear no trace of. It’s not loss that humbles me.

What used to look like memory — clouds for hours breaking,

gathering, then breaking up again — lately seems instead

like a dance, one of those slower, too complicated numbers

I never had much time for. Not knowing exactly what it’s

come to is so much different from understanding that it’s come

to nothing. Why is it, then, each day, they feel more the same?

Harryette Mullen

 by Sampsonia Way    /  July 26, 2013  / No comments

it's rank, it cranks you up

it’s rank it cranks you up

crash you’re fracked you suck

shucks you’re wack you be

all you cracked up to be

 

dead on arrival

overdosed on whatever

excess of hate and love

I sleep alone

 

if you were there

then please come in

tell me what’s good

think up something

 

psychic sidekick

gimme a pigfoot

show me my lifeline

read me my rights

Dale Smith

 

   (for Ed Dorn)

Socratic bullets brain the narrow witted
Charmers and snake oil technicians who
Inherit a new order of human
Progress gripping a bull by the balls
The rambler takes new course among a band
Of star forms stitched in a Far West sky
Above the banks Embarrass to Hugh's Town
Brokers Dellianaires and other dis-
Possessed post-industry clerks eyes blurred
On pixeled screens' obital pages
Ashes spread high in rocky mountains
Fuck it, it feels like a hole in the sky
Yellow pages selling Amazons
Dot com confident triumphant win-win

Craig Santos Perez

 

Craig Santos Perez
Chamorro Ecopoet

ginen the micronesian kingfisher [i sihek]

                                                                ~

[our] nightmare : no

birdsong—

the jungle was riven emptied

of [i sihek] bright blue green turquoise red gold

feathers—everywhere : brown

tree snakes avian

silence—

the snakes entered

without words when [we] saw them it was too late—

they were at [our] doors sliding along

the passages of [i sihek]

empire—then

the zookeepers came—

called it species survival plan—captured [i sihek] and transferred

the last

twenty-nine micronesian kingfishers

to zoos for captive breeding [1988]—they repeated [i sihek]

and repeated :

"if it weren't for us

your birds                    [i sihek]

would be gone

forever"

what does not change /

last wild seen—

 

Hoa Nguyễn

 

If you have a poem in our anthology what inspired you to write it?: 

I’m interested in representing Asian women outside of the typical stereotypes offered in the West in literature or popular culture. Just today I was reading this analysis on the vilified and anonymous representation of Asians in the film No Escape, an action movie set in a nameless Asian country with white people as the only central characters. The critic elaborates: “Meanwhile, not a single girl of color or woman of color speaks an important line of dialogue in the entire film. In fact, women of color remain the most indistinct group of all in No Escape. They are more likely to be referenced in relation to sex work than they are to speak. Which taps into another racist, misogynistic tradition of exotifying and hyper-sexualizing Asian women.”

This poem [“My Idea of the Circus Is My Idea of the Circus Otherwise Known As: My Mother Was a Celebrated Stunt Motorcyclist, Vietnam, 1958 to 1962”]is my way of answering back to these kinds of stereotypes and lack of true representation and is part of a series that I am developing. Part verse meditation and part documentary on 1960s Vietnam, it is a poetic narrative that includes a verse biography on my mother, Diệp Nguyễn, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman circus troupe. My aim for the series is to investigate historical, personal, and cultural pressures of the period—as well as the difficulties of distance, memory and language itself.

Prageeta Sharma

 

Contemporaries and Snobs 

after Laura Riding Jackson

There's a structure for idiocy—lamplight—

all over the nation; it's an illumination

with such sheer creative force it is misrecognized genius.

I have misunderstood people's duplicitous ways—their lightbulbs—

as righteous forms of complexity;

not calculated obfuscations.

Much like the voice in a poem that insists it sing

the most important seer of light.

Am I providing this luxury as well?

Or is this my radical assertion in order to

call into question what an aesthetic authority looks like?

(That's my problem with the poem these days.)

(The light in my office flickers on and off—the lamp is broken.)

I see no enlightenment here, much like I see my acquaintances:

bright lights and night lights.

The fragility of the intellectual is the same as the poet's:

It's all about the I and its desperate sense of the we.

Diane di Prima

 

Diane di Prima
Revolutionary Letters, 1968
Detroit Artists’ Worskshop Press, Detroit

Published in various versions over the years, Diane di Prima’s incendiary Revolutionary Letters were dedicated to Bob Dylan and offered free for reproduction. The radical collective Detroit Artists’ Workshop, founded in 1964 and originally known as the Artists’ Workshop Society, produced this edition. The group was devoted to the vision of a communal, engaged, and non-commercial group of artists, poets, and musicians. The group was inspired, in part, by the poetics of Amiri Baraka (born Leroi Jones), as described in a manifesto by one of the collective’s co-founders, John Sinclair.

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #2

the value of an individual life the credo they taught us
to instill fear, and inaction, ‘you only live once’
a fog in our eyes, we are
endless as the sea, not separate, we die
a million times a day, we are born
a million times, each breath life and death
get up, put on your shoes, get
started, someone else will finish
//
Tribe
an organism, one flesh, breathing joy as the stars
breathe destiny down on us, get
going, join hands, see to business, thousands of sons
will see to it when you fall, you will grow
a thousands times in the bellies of your sisters

Philip Larkin

 

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,   

The earl and countess lie in stone,   

Their proper habits vaguely shown   

As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,   

And that faint hint of the absurd—   

The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque    

Hardly involves the eye, until

It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still   

Clasped empty in the other; and   

One sees, with a sharp tender shock,   

His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.   

Such faithfulness in effigy

Was just a detail friends would see:

A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace   

Thrown off in helping to prolong   

The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in

Their supine stationary voyage

The air would change to soundless damage,   

Turn the old tenantry away;

How soon succeeding eyes begin

To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths   

Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light

Each summer thronged the glass. A bright   

Litter of birdcalls strewed the same

Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths   

The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.   

Now, helpless in the hollow of   

An unarmorial age, a trough

Of smoke in slow suspended skeins   

Above their scrap of history,   

Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into   

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be   

Their final blazon, and to prove   

Our almost-instinct almost true:   

What will survive of us is love.