Lots and lots of neat

Yesterday, Carrie, Viola, and I went to MASS MOCA. And this Alex da Corte installation was one of my favorite. It’s hard to give a full scope of this particular exhibit (you can see the pictures at the museum’s web site). In this picture, though, you should try to imagine not seeing the house front as pink. Because it doesn’t have to be. If you were to walk from a different direction, it would be white. Or green. The hands would be tossing or flying out the window. 

The swan in the foreground, is in a shallow pool. Enough water to push and get a small rippling wake behind it. Everything is a little off, a little too comfortably situated. There are lilly pads in the corner. And plastic pancakes with little pats of plastic butter on top. 

There are children and an ocean, a deep ocean, with a boat moving out. No, it’s only a lake. But it feels like an ocean. There’s depression, too. Obviously. And who would think there could be so much interesting in depression, and what we would be helpless to. Being a human can be a horrible horrible experience, and this poem makes it clear that the person speaking here knows how horrible it is when you care. I can feel like this person cares. I care now, too.

She is a mother. She lives in a house. She lives in an apartment. She is acclimated to the dimensions of a big city, but many of the poems in this book only mention the big city as something she knows. Quite possibly, she loves the big city more than anything else, because there are no words for this city. Love need not be measured in words. Or even lack of wording. Just in reference and allusion and expansion within the setting that she is at. Is she in Paris when all the words that she uses to talk about the culture are French? Likely. Is the Big City New York even if she never actually gives the city its name? None other, lover! 

These are exercises that she does. Is she Rachel Zucker? I like Rachel Zucker, especially in the despicability she has been in other books that feature someone with all the same lifestyle accommodations as what I know Rachel Zucker has. She is the personhood side of a public figure. She has three children. She looks to the she within her and keeps noticing all the different qualities a she must and will and did and ruefully have as an animal. A human is an animal. She is a human-animal living somewhere where knowing about the city is a way of knowing herself as the animal that prefers cities but still finds relish in other-than-city locales. 

What if poetry were written for the sake of butter. And I'm thinking mainly of butter, how it coagulates on the plate when you leave it out with the dirty dishes. You're wanting to put off the dishes. Just for a little bit. And the butter is like, OK. Now it is butter coagulating. The object correlative necessary to consider how coherence is a process, our understanding of coherence is not so neat and tidy as we'd like to think. Are you thinking about water, and the water gathering in small places and large places? That's one form of cohering.

Another is the impulse in animals to gather around death. And acknowledge some strange difficulty that everyone is having together about this one event. Look at how elephants do it. It's easier to think of it when elephants are doing it, because when people do it our peopleness keeps getting in the way of us seeing the natural fact of the matter.

How does Graham Foust expect us to outline the location of a speaking voice poem if it's clear Graham Foust doesn't actually know the origin or location or similitude or speaking arrangement or just even the physical vocal part of his body that makes language in the air? Graham Foust, how do you order hotcakes at Bob Evans? "Don't make it a poem." Obviously. 

Most poems I know have done the courtesy of locating this device called "speaker." But not Graham Foust, who couldn't even be competently labeled "Graham Foust" in these poems. Or "consciousness." The poems are all in some ambiguous in-between of these three speaking entities. And include the term, "'the muse'." Include the term, "architecture." Sometimes, readers found in this circumstance might opt for a term like, "soliloquy." A nice, conflationary term. But Graham Foust isn't planning to let anyone let this happen. He knows your tricks to isolate his method. Or mollify his method. Or just dim all the spectacular lights that are happening in the poem, like you, reader, thought you could just feed the poem a little shot of codeine, and it would be dulled down for your palate. "That's not going to happen." says Graham Foust. Who is more like Kanye West in this moment, singing "All of the Lights." All of those methods of making a voice are going to paradox the whole idea of voice for you. All of the lights shining on paradox until even the dark shadow of "paradox," teased out by light, appears its own paradox. 

Whoa, Rachel B. Glaser. Where are you going with that woman thing in your pocket. It's like a smart drape laid over an otherwise practical poem. Drape! Quit with that voice, "Woman thannnggggg...." It sounds too much like James Franco. 

Can you take Woman Thing on a bus? In an airport? On a bench? With a half-pint of other liqueur present? I don't need another liqueur. I just want whatever that woman thing is. I want to hold it in my pocket. No, I want you to hold it just out of my reach. WOMAN THING! I've never seen Streetcar Named Desire, but I know that scene where the main character is yelling, "Stella!" That's not me. I'm whimpering over on the side. "Woman thing?" It's so placid and concrete and solid and a rock. I have a rock I've collected from a beach in Connecticut. It has the perfect weight and density. It feels just right in my hand. I like when you hold the WOMAN THING right in my face, and I can fantasize I'm holding this rock. Hey, Woman Thing! Is this what it's like to be writing about a Woman Thing? What is so thing about a woman thing? Rachel B. Glaser. I think the B. in your name stands for THING!! Which isn't a very sensible use of the word B. 

“Alexander the Great,” by Rachel Harrison I keep trying to put this somewhere in my brain. Does it belong in a department store? At a NASCAR? In the painting aisle at Home Depot? She doesn’t belong anywhere, obviously. 

My God. I am just in such awe of this book review. Sean Patrick Hill brings the kinds of questions to Matthew Zapruder’s poems that are as peevish as they are thoughtful. As insistent as they are considerate. I want to have a beer with Sean Patrick Hill after reading this. Because I like imagining that he and I would be thinking different thoughts about how to push back at this tidal wave of poetry publishing. Hold up, poetry! Or, rather, Wow! Poetry! Or, rather, Really? That’s poem? It’s what I do every time I read a poem. It’s what I suspect everyone does if they have taste. 

"Untitled #1180 (Beatrice)," by Petah Coyne. 

This piece appears in the context of an article about birds, when birds appear in art. And I just really like how these birds in Coyne's piece are dead. Like, really dead. Definitely dead. But what is this object / creature / organic presence that has smothered the birds? Was there some malicious wind that blew the birds into it? They all look like they lost their balance.

I was just reading this morning about nests. Specifically, I was reading Bachelard's chapter from The Poetics of Space about nests, and how the nest evokes comfort and belonging, not just on a psychological level, but on a level of muscle memory. As animals, we fit into whatever we identify as our nest.