Tuesday poem #12 : Rae Armantrout : RITUALS

    1

In this now ancient ritual

a succession of young women

are saucy,

which is to say they name

common objects and relations

as if they had mastered them

but shouldn’t.

Each receives false approbation.

     2

As Xmas sells winter

to its prisoners.

As warmth

feels like love;

and love is warmth

only more capricious.

Fingers uncurl.

Organs expand

and rise

toward a surface

that must never

be broken.

Just Saying, Rae Armantrout’s most recent book of poems, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2013.. Versed (Wesleyan, 2009) received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Next Life (Wesleyan, 2007) was chosen as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by The New York Times. Other recent books include Money Shot (Wesleyan, 2011,) Collected Prose (Singing Horse, 2007), Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004), The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). She is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego. Writing in Poetry magazine, Ange Mlinko has said, “I would trade the bulk of contemporary anecdotal free verse for more incisive, chilling poetry like Armantrout’s.”

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #11 : Maria Damon : After Man Ray

As of July 1, 2013, Maria Damon will be joining the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at the Pratt Institute of Art. She has taught poetry and poetics at the University of Minnesota for 25 years. She is the author of several books of poetry scholarship, co-author of several books of poetry (with mIEKAL aND and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen) and co-editor, with Ira Livingston, of Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #10 : Roland Prevost : The Charm

It holds me where I hold it
where our interstices meet


Unsolvable as life or death
it bets on every race


At home in my coat pocket
it covers what it covers


Even diamond drill bits
waltz off its smooth face 


Roland Prevost's poetry appears in Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, the Ottawa Arts Review, Bywords Quarterly Journal, The Peter F. Yacht Club, and ottawater (online) among many more. He has four chapbooks: Metafizz (2007, Bywords), Dragon Verses (2009, Dusty Owl), Our/ Are Carried Invisibles (2009, above/ground), and Parapagus (2012, above/ground). He's also been published in three poetry collections by AngelHousePress: Whack of Clouds (2008), Pent Up (2009), and Experiment-O (Issue 1, 2008 online).  He won the 2006 John Newlove Poetry Award. He was, for a few years, the managing editor of 17 seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, as well as poetics.ca, both online. He studied English and Psychology at York University and the University of Manitoba.  He lives and writes in Ottawa, Canada.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #9 : Erín Moure : Birthday

I think I was awash in a sea of birds.
Verbs were why I wrote,

I wrote to rid myself of verbs.

Trials were alphabets, I found myself guilty, I found
myself alone
scraping letters on a stone.

I was seventeen, just barely.

I think I was awash in a dream of verbs.
Birds circled over roofs
that sheltered me.

I try to follow you, grave verbs,
with a notebook from the East of Europe,
the far East of Europe,

Asia. And I am fifty eight and
I am seventeen, going on twenty.


Montreal poet Erín Moure writes poetry and essays, and translates poetry—from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese by poets such as Nicole Brossard, Andrés Ajens, Louise Dupré, Rosalía de Castro, Chus Pato and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, Pat Lowther Memorial, A.M. Klein, and was a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. She recently finished Kapusta, a sequel to The Unmemntioable (Anansi, 2012) and a further investigation into subjectivity and wartime in Ukraine and Alberta, and is now finishing Insecession, an autobiography and poetics that echoes Chus Pato’s Secession, which will published together with Secession as one book in 2014. This poem is from The Elements, a new manuscript in early progress.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan