SWINHOE'S SOFT-SHELL TURTLE

Eight eyes observe
the zero, the zero
of the moon
through the water,
like one milky eye--
dwindling: this is
one minus one minus
one until only
the rustle of lungs
that do not make
the thrum of winds,
what is divinest
rarest, to become
a god keep dying
until the lake hides
you forever at last,
a fable, only fools
believe you could
have existed at all.

Two-tone blushing
petals, scattered & mashed
by passerby into flagstone,
texture of bug-guts
bleeding to a stain--
remnant or revenant
emblazoned pavement
until scoured by rain,
like the shadow
that cannot be swept
in old China, likewise
no release from this
disintegration.

Not like snow, or even snow-
like drifts of shredded receipts
that fiercely blow
in cold spring air down
the slum street of Steinway.
The lonesome tree budding
pink flames & then
losing them to the steady crush
of the people who don't look
down & the people who do
gaze at dirty shoes, returning
from another god-damned
day.

Oh crap.

Tomorrow an extra good one...

I feel like when I go swimming at the gym and it seems like I've been swimming for a long time, and I stop to check the clock and I've been swimming for like 5 minutes.

This one is cheating because it was not written today, or this month for that matter. But you've never seen it before, so just pretend that I'm lying.

CAROUSEL HORSE




Flesh a ship’s flesh

bones the bones 

of the dead
a gilded instrument   

bespangled

trotting mouth 
agape  at

München 

 Follow 
the cameleopard
 Leviathan
my brother
 Ark  lion: 
blade & frost born M.

Illions chopped  loudly painted 
 round haunches

 a kouros
for the children-burden 
for the brass ring-
clink into fingers
the lightbulbs’ glowworms

matte wooden axle-Bavaria
in a child or monk’s hand,
Neuschwanstein, always
mountain-sized 
 mädchen &

scale errors 
never daunted
 giving

as only object can
love inanimate animate love 



 mount

of God
  (nostalgia)
of History 
 (nostalgia).

In the loop powerless 
seizing

gazes & bodies
Touched
moreso than 
a quick beast

in successions’ rosary 
 leisure station 

 such as I am

wooden phantom, a cog
no less perfect 

moving

stasis
orbit & archetype, 

warped & buckled

ever resplendent 

plastic finery

bronze tack & rod

unclosed eyes 

trotting always

toward my brothers & sisters
away from my brothers & sisters

Commercial Break

We interrupt NaPoWriMo to bring you the following announcement:

If you are in NYC on Monday, April 14th, come hear me
and the other winners of the New School 2007 Chapbook
Contest read at the New School. It is unusual work (for
me), and I'm not sure you will be able to get a copy of
the chapbook anywhere else besides the New School and
this reading.

Details below.

The Graduate Writing Program is pleased to announce
the winners of the 2007 New School Chapbook
Contest. Here are the results:

2007 Winners:

Fiction:
Emily Taylor, selected by Kevin McIlvoy

Poetry:
Mark Lamoureux, selected by Deborah Landau

Non-Fiction:
Laura Esther Wolfson, selected by Danielle Trussoni

Writing for Children:
Lucas Klauss, selected by Elizabeth Van Doren

The winning manuscripts will be published this spring in an edition of 250 chapbooks. In addition, there will also be a reading by these alumni on Monday, April 14th at 66 W 12th Rm. 510 at 6:30pm. Congratulations to the winners and thank you to all those who participated.

HOT AIR BALLOON ABOVE BAVARIA
for Sandra Simonds

Through the telescoping bone
glass, spot the tardy pairs still
searching for the ark amongst
the crystal drifts & the chateau
where Young Werther went
to die.

Lighter than air, but never heavier
than I. Language is a lie:
I’ve not found yellow custard
anywhere here even
snowdusted eaves hide
only boilerplate & boxes of
crispy receipts.

The sun stops, drops &
rolls o’er the little hills, a
tumbleweed of sparks from up here.

In crablike helmets & copper
jumpsuits, descend to the Breughel
painting & start a modern
religion. Bring me:

donuts, Madeira, an astrolabe,
some clothes to go out in &
a wooden replica to replace this unreliable
right hand.

Kung Fou

Some grad. school chums just launched a new online magazine, Fou, where you will find me, (sandwiched between two much better poets, Dottie Lasky and Brenda Iijima). There's also work by my teacher Elaine Equi, among many other worthies.

In other news, I am doing...uh...spiritual? mental? calisthenics to prepare for an honest attempt at NaPoWriMo. I have some dirty tricks up my sleeve, so I imagine I will be able to pull it off.

NaPoWriMo

I have been writing short descriptions of the beach at Kingsborough Community College every day I go out there (as part of a project I have been working on, namely, writing short descriptions of the beach at Kingsborough Community College every day I go out there), so I suppose I am somewhat prepped to undertake NaPoWriMo this year, despite my complete inability to write anything in the blog or answer emails ordinarily. If it does not precipitate brilliant poetry, it will perhaps at least get me back in the habit of writing on the blog. Not that anyone has missed me writing on the blog, but still, there has been a marked lack of my monotonous, whiny voice in the ether of late.

But you should steel youself for the fount of banal crap that will most likely issue forth from my fingers for 30 days in April.

R.I.P.

Gary Gygax drops to -10.

Landis Everson's WHEN YOU HAVE A RABBIT

Cy Gist Press is happy to announce the general release of Landis Everson's When You Have A Rabbit in connection with the Landis Everson Memorial Reading at St. Mark's Poetry Project on February 22nd, 2008.


(30 pp. Saddle-Stitched). 28 poems written after Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005. Edited by Ben Mazer. Cover Art by Kris Chau. $8 ppd.

Landis Everson was born in 1926 in Coronado, California. When he got to Berkeley in the late 1940s he met Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser and they called themselves The Berkeley Renaissance. Landis studied with Josephine Miles and was the editor of the Berkeley student literary magazine, Occident. Miles called Landis and his friends The Museum School of poetry. Duncan was influenced by Landis and called him The Poet King in letters to Spicer. Spicer admired the ease with which Landis wrote poetry, and wrote to Robin Blaser that Landis was a god for each member of the group. In 1951, while finishing a Master's at Columbia, Landis met John Ashbery who admired his poems and would later print selections from "The Little Ghost I Played With" in Locus Solus. The subject of Landis's Master's thesis was an imaginary seventeenth century poet called Sir William Bargoth, for which Landis concocted both the poems and the commentary upon them. In 1955, while Karl Shapiro's teaching assistant at Berkeley, Landis had the first of six appearances in Poetry, two appearances in the mid-Fifties, followed by four appearances five decades later. In the late 1950s he was introduced to a younger generation of poets that included Joanne Kyger and John Wieners. In 1960, Landis replaced Robert Duncan as the third member of a Sunday poetry group that was run by Jack Spicer and met in Robin Blaser's apartment in San Francisco. Dictated serial poetry was the order of the day. Landis wrote the sequences "Postcard from Eden" and "The Little Ghost I Played With," a few months too late to be considered for Don Allen's anthology The New American Poetry. Then the group stopped meeting, and Landis, who was only writing for his friends, turned to painting, and renovating houses. He didn't write anything for 43 years, during which time none of his poetry appeared in print. Then in the fall of 2003, Ben Mazer contacted Landis to inquire about Landis's poems, which Mazer planned to include in a feature on the Berkeley Renaissance for Fulcrum. Over the next three years, the last of his life, Landis would compose over 300 poems, comprising the book Everything Preserved, which won the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation, and Book of Valentines, still in manuscript form. In the spring of 2006 Landis had the first in a series of strokes, which left him incapable of writing any more poems. He took his life on November 17th last year.




Young Goodman Brown

Young Goodman Brown was a window shade.
One side faced Paradise and Hell outdoors
the other furniture, food and shelter in.
But when Faith rolled him up
he saw himself no more.

A spider squeezed out the center and
threaded down. It yawned and opened
its eyes from sleep. All six legs flexed
wide, and like rust it farted spider dust,
which filled the house. We came in

with mops, hexes and vacuum cleaners,
until the house looked clean. But
how to kill a spider, which wasn�t ours?
It was masturbating like hell with every leg. Did
Young Goodman teach him that? Or Nathaniel?.


--Landis Everson