Tuesday poem #447 : Andrew DuBois : Ill-Rendered Lines from Icelandic

 

 

 

Thereof I battle some sore pressing sorrow
Blinded by heartr’d deflowered old sins
Mortgaged our cottage my fortune all torn 

Pins affixed augur to grey-vines a thru-skull
Visitors petted are long offered lead
Better so vetted get sack-lunches hearty 

All seem mere horrid at best a berserker
Little prostrators do lop off all anger
Some variation in starkness or hog 

Vomiting rag-muffin visits lore-sorrow
Better I err all days stigma a-bed
Honey burnt brown a miscarriage of light 

Rended-hung thought in a heather a-flying
Hedging blood-letting for landing make bier.

 

 

 

A cento-sonnet:
Jón Jóhannesson, “Þar Í Byggð”
Jón úr Vör, “Hérna Í Stofunni Minni”
Þóra Jónsdóttir, “Sárið Sem Aldrei Grær”
Matthías Johannessen, “Hann’amma”
Steinn Steinarr, “Í Áfanga”
Helga Steinvör Baldvinsdóttir (Undína), “Heimurinn”
Davið Stefánsson, “Fjallalíf”
Steingerður Guðmundsdóttir, “Vor á Íslandi”
Þhoroddur Guðmundsson, “Guðmundur Arason”
Stephan G. Stephansson, “Illugadrápa”
Bjarni Thorarensen, “Herhvöt”
Unnur Benediktsdóttir (Hulda), “Eins og úr Blómabikar”
Bólu-Hjálmars, “Kveðið Í Þungri Legu”
Bólu-Hjálmars, “Vertíðarlok”

 

 

Andrew DuBois is the author of a book of poetry (All the People Are Pregnant, 2021), a collection of essays and reviews (Start to Figure, 2020), a lyrical novella (He We Her / I Am White, 2019), and a book of criticism (Ashbery’s Forms of Attention, 2006). He also co-edited The Anthology of Rap (2010) and Close Reading: The Reader (2003). A professor of English at the University of Toronto, he splits his time between the GTA and Carbonear, Newfoundland, where he is owner of the Green Door Book Store. 

The Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #446 : Paul Pearson : Tzara The Great

 

 

Over 1 billion animals feared dead in Australian wildfires,
           experts say
                           - USA Today, January 8, 2020.

this is not:
            art
            rhetoric           
            history
            metaphor
            propaganda
            allegory
            fashion            

this is:
           disaster

so take off your clothes:
           fashion
so take off your hair:   
           allegory
so take off your skin:
           metaphor
so take off your flesh:
           history
so take off your voice:
           rhetoric
so take off your eyes:
           art

stand there in your bones that shabby shambling rack you’ve been dragging around

stand there in your calcium in your skeleton in the one thing that makes you the same as me

stand there in your stone in that which you've leached from the earth

stand there in your ivory in the one thing we share with every other living thing through every creature that has ever verted and will never brate again

stand there in this incontrovertible extinction

stand there and weep for what you have done

this is:
            the end
           Tarzan

and you are:
           the author

stand there and:

 

 

Raised in a mining town in the mountainous back-country of southeastern British Columbia, Paul Pearson now lives in Edmonton where he lives and writes with his wife and two children. He has worked as an arts administrator in the non-profit sector and spent nearly two decades with the Government of Alberta and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts before making the jump to Municipal government administration in 2018.

Paul has been heavily involved in the literary arts community in Alberta for more than 20 years. He is the co-founding editor and chapbook designer for the Olive Reading Series and a current board member of the Edmonton Poetry Festival. His poems have appeared in Descant and Event, and the anthology Writing the Land: Alberta Through Its Poets from House of Blue Skies. His debut collection, Lunatic Engine, was published by Turnstone Press in the fall of 2020.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #445 : Camille Guthrie : A MAN OF LEGEND

 

 

I.
Remember when you were tutor to Nero?
You burned so hot in your linen robes
That soul patch Wayfarers and sarcastic wit
He blamed you for the Great Fire of Rome

II.
Merchant sailors tell tales of your beach body
Sing of the battle you head-banged a Kraken
With its tears, it drowned an atoll populated by Sirens
That was a sad day in Old Oceania 

III.
Nine Medieval volumes dedicated to your cheekbones
Ten thousand Latin lines concern your swagger
Three out of four monks sweated over the verbs
Painstakingly transcribing your butt in bike shorts 

IV.
This 10^th century Byzantine encyclopedia relates
Your early training with Imperial masters
Master of kickboxing, archery, Bulgarian raiding
And sixteen arts of seduction, whew! I’m spent 

V.
The Seven Sages of Greece prophesized
The Bulge of His Biceps in an 12,000-line poem
12,000 graduate students are decoding it daily
No one will survive or graduate on schedule 

VI.
Neither fire nor flood nor neglect nor bookworms
Can touch the Legacy of the Moneymaker
Or misinterpret the Epic of Your Bits at this moment
I’m retranslating the original manuscript

 

 

 

Camille Guthrie is the author of four books of poetry: Diamonds (BOA Editions, fall 2021); Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois (2013), In Captivity (2006), and The Master Thief (2000)--published by Subpress. Her poems have appeared in such publications as At Length, Boston Review, Interim, The Iowa Review, On the Seawall, The New Republic, Tin House, as well as in several anthologies including The Best of American Poetry 2019 & 2020. The Director of the Undergraduate Writing Initiatives at Bennington College, she lives in rural Vermont. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan