Happy Normative Heterosexual Consumer Day

I had a dream that I won a prize for a poem I wrote called "Justine," so I figured I ought to write one. Though I suppose because I have put it here, it means I will never win a prize for it.


JUSTINE

Justine views the carousel
through the mod angles
of the tent caterpillars.

She cuts her foot on the barb
of the horseshoe crab.

Justine feels cooler where
the jailhouse bands
of shadow hit, she knows
how the world acts
upon the body like a
sentence.

She thinks of the faces
of strangers, how they
ebb into & out of death.

All the faces that have ever
been pressed into the deltas
of air the arms
of the tree make.

Justine runs on the sand
& watches the man
with peach-colored
spectacles.

A star will dislodge
from its firmament
& she will know
it is all
a game, it is all
a question of scale.

Justine sees the olive trees
know the word
for mistakes, the bronze
fish lives in a pail
of salty water.

Justine wants to let it go,
but she knows it will
find itself
in the hungry wheel
of the riverboat,

propelled by parcels
of water along the bay
shaped like a comma
upside down. Justine looks up
at the sky & knows you
can’t look into the ground
in the same way. This proves
death is forever.

Justine will write her epitaph
in the aforementioned
sand, protestations of the quick
given to the sea.

Justine will wait until the lost
ocean things walk
back up upon shore. She knows
each thing will happen, if given
enough time:

A spider will inch backwards
up the wall, the sun
will turn to milk, the
shadows will burn onto the water
with the smell of wood;
in enough time, each
thing is possible, even
Justine.

Frank Sherlock is very sick and needs your help.

Hey, look, there's a reading in Queens. Queens! Where I live! It's the first reading there's been in Queens since I moved here a year and a half ago. Woohoo! It just won't seem like a poetry reading without an hour-long train ride...

Sunday, February 11, 3:00pm
Poetry in the Presence of Sculpture

Brenda Iijima, Jill Magi, Sawako Nakayasu and Srikanth Reddy share work that
resonates with the renowned Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988)
in the exquisite museum and rock garden dedicated to his art.

Co-sponsored by The Noguchi Museum.

@ The Noguchi Museum
9-01 33 rd Road at Vernon Blvd., Long Island City
(N to Broadway in Queens, walk west on Broadway to Vernon Blvd.
For information about shuttle buses to the Museum, visit www.noguchi.org)
$10, $5 for seniors and students, Free to Poets House & Noguchi Museum Members

More shameless self-promo: this was Brenda Iijima's introduction for the Segue Series I read at a couple of weeks ago. Brenda has known me and my work for a long time; I thought I'd post her excellent (of course I am somewhat biased) introduction here so folks who were not at the reading can see it. I am going to start carrying this around with me on a little card, so when people ask me, "So, like, what kind of poetry do you write," I can answer with something besides, "I don't answer that question.":

"Tucked in the folds of numerous fugitive, finely construed, delicately manifested chapbooks of Mark’s are soulful immediacies emitted in a syntactic stream of synestetic particulars. The largess of dreams is shattered and shattered again into pressurized miniatures of detail where desiccation and nostalgia meet. Pressures and stresses are psychic. Swirling and careening between planetary cycles, somewheres hover. Mark’s lyric is crowded with the delicate filaments of ghosts, monsters, spirits, mythology, stuff of existence, banal trinkets, detritus and the numina inhabiting the objectified world of these visionary subjects. Planetary cycles and desire pull these details into focus, suture the traces, suspend animation—there is a tug between the ethereal and the terrestrial. This is a revenant’s teleology, a kind of doctrine that tells us phenomena are guided not only by mechanical forces but that they also move toward certain goals of self realization—there are vibes. Each utterance of Mark's is a divining voice. Where is water, where are the gods, what is war, and love’s necessities? Each calibration is a tension aligning beauty and the psyche. This, from his poem Spica.

“A matter of elephantine

significance lumbers

through the flax, its huge

knees, tedious effluvium:

the egg-timer of the sky

ripostes: purple flashes

in the middle places,

invigored motes goad

the flapping field:

the rocks are alive

Do you hear me?

the rocks are alive.”

I finally switched to the new Blogger, so I suppose it is finally time to upgrade my template, links, etc. As I more or less wrote the original one in HTML myself, this is likely to be a somewhat buggy process, so if things look weird here at the blog today, that is the reason why.

On the positive side, I can finally update my links.

FEINTS

Now the wine tastes like melted ice


Winnowing. The night. Split. Like an orange.


Teleological blunderbuss


Take the train into the wide mouth


Liminal door goldfish brain


Aporetic nave, intercapillary umbilical


Sponge-mouthed & needing


A forest of sutures adopts a stance like


Necromancy romantic, thin blue lips


Rock candy cage, splinters


Furrowed broken shattered trussed


This is empty like the air around a ship


Don’t speak


Laburnum walk ghost break


This is the unending end


Doffed & quartered & shunt


The tidemark of the blood


Sugar rain spilled into the inkpot


A copper plain marred by speech


Go into the somber maze


We were all dying for a crack


There was no place, it was said

Just Be

From Yahoo! news:

"A huge explosion rocked central Baghdad just be for sunset Thursday."

I guess it's hard to copyedit when things are blowing up around you. One collosal mistake spawns a million little ones.

I know I, myself, am for sunset.

I am working on putting together an anthology of 20th and 21st century ekphrastic poetry (poetry about visual art) from the U.S. I am now beginning the daunting process of assembling a list of poems to be considered for the anthology. I don't have a publisher yet, but once I have assembled the anthology I am going to try to find one.

I am hoping you can take a moment and list any ekphrastic poems you can think of and backchannel to mark_lamoureux@yahoo.com with the subject heading "Ekphrastic Poems." The only criteria are that the poet be one who has published in the 20th or 21st centuries. I am limiting the scope to published poems in an attempt to control the size of the project a little bit.

I am hoping to display the poem side-by-side with the image (or an image of the work in the case of sculpture) that the poem is about; so the poems should be about works of art that I could hypothetically obtain an image of.