Tuesday poem #51 : Susan Elmslie : Icarus, in Therapy

“As long as you tried your best,”
he’d say, as though I was fair to middling
and down in the dumps.
But I’d always get the highest grades, and once
a perfect report card: formidable
as Alpine slopes after an avalanche.
A taste of rarefied air.
I tried harder. Gold medals. The important thing,
to try. My best.
I learned to test its heights
and depths. Was prairie sky,
nights before exams, popping Wake Ups,
forty milligrams of caffeine
in a pill smaller than a watch battery.
Laps on an empty stomach. I hungered
for the simplicity
of twenty bucks for each A, the motivation
of venture capitalists, a bottom line.
But I chained myself to trying my best
until the outcome was extraneous,
the effort so pure,
it defined my whole myth.

Susan Elmslie’s first trade collection of poetry, I, Nadja, and Other Poems (Brick) won the Quebec Writers’ Federation A.M. Klein Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the McAuslan First Book Prize, the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Award and a ReLit Award.  Her poems have also appeared in several Canadian journals, anthologies, and in a prize-winning chapbook, When Your Body Takes to Trembling.  Her poetry has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts grants for Professional Writers.  She has been a poetry Fellow at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and a winner of Arc’s Poem of the Year contest.  www.susanelmslie.org

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #50 : Elizabeth Willis : WATERTOWN IS NINETY-NINE PERCENT LAND

When I point to the island, I mean a body on a map. Think about the heart: it doesn't have to form a sentence. If the story feels cold it's because the beginning is so far away. One thing leading to another. Every city has its battles. A brother's voice can carry out a mission like a hand. This is where the voice turns pale when I stop to eat my breakfast. Something gathered in a sack outside the kitchen is how I feel. Pray for us singers in the forest of our discontent. All those empty lawns are staring down the partly cloudy stars. The man in the boat is trying to plug a hole made of all he'll never have. Someday even this will disappear into another death, an absence you didn't know was holding up the future. Follow the line till it no longer asks for more. Desire is irreducible, particular, crystalline. Its name is Georgia. Syracuse. Cheyenne.

Elizabeth Willis's most recent book, Address (Wesleyan, 2011), won the PEN New England / L. L. Winship Prize for Poetry. Her other books of poetry are Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan, 2006), Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003), The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995) and Second Law (Avenue B, 1993). She has also edited a volume of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (University of Iowa Press, 2008). She teaches at Wesleyan University and was a 2012-13 Guggenheim fellow. A recent interview (with Sean Patrick Hill) appears here: http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/index.php?n=2&si=49&s=3051

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #49 : Karen Mac Cormack : Various Turns

commonly

in place of

word for word

against

a comparison

to regular order

prescription

a detail with reasons

proportionate share

as far as

the plan of a forthcoming book

more

everywhere

state of equality

for all

a memorial

writ commanding

letter for letter

also; an article

extemporaneous composition

in the first place

let it be printed

in the same place

freely

a decree unpremeditated

departure

therefore

erase or expunge

mark used in interlineation

an additional premium

in English

elsewhere

;

Karen Mac Cormack [photo credit: Clare Paniccia] is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, most recently AGAINST WHITE (Veer Books, London, 2013). Her poems have appeared in a number of anthologies including Moving Borders, Out of Everywhere, Another Language, and Prismatic Publics. Her texts have been translated into French, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian. Of dual Canadian/British citizenship she lived in Toronto for many years and in 2004 moved to the USA where she teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #48 : Monty Reid : from Host

All

All worlds
are small worlds.

There is no other thing that could be human.

Or no thing
that could be human.

Wisp of.
Yaw of.

In the ducts of.


Dysregulation

Perhaps this is not the time to tell you about Toxoplasma.

That’s because you probably have Toxoplasma
machinery at work in your brain.

Most people do.

And Toxoplasma has no interest in hearing about itself.
It has no interest in the dead instruments of metaphor.

It hides within your cells and secretes a heat-sensitive factor
that dysregulates cell division.

It makes precisely 128 copies before it spills out of
whatever cell has been holding it and the phages can attack it.

But some always survive.

All of this activity can modify your behavior.
For instance, it can make you think you are something
other than what you are.

It could make you more affectionate towards your cat
which is Toxoplasma’s final host.

Cells always die.  And you have to get it there.


Instructions to the Phage

They are lost – show them the way.
They are mistaken. They have entered the shadow assuming it was something else.

They thought it was an object but it was only a thing.
Things are not objects, not the phantoms for the subject, just the think of it.

They have crept to a penetration site and transformed themselves.
They have released the serum that dissolves the tissue.
They have passed through the surface effect of the skin.

They have made a cloak of invisibility from the camouflage molecules snipped from your cells and distributed on the surfaces of the shadow.

And still, they are lost.  Show them the way.

Let them move deeper through the heat flux of the material
through the catenated tissues, let them be the space you have come to think of as yours.

Just because you hear the voices does not mean they are meant for you.
Just because they have entered doesn’t mean they have stopped looking for you.

You can partition the sensible all you want and they will not stop.
You are never enough.
Finding you is never enough.

Let them enter the phage that has been sent to kill you.
Let them breach the security of the skin.
Let them enter the wilderness and stay there.

Monty Reid [photo credit: Max Middle] is an Ottawa writer.  His most recent full-length collections are Disappointment Island (Chaudiere) and The Luskville Reductions (Brick).  Recently he has published chapbooks with various small presses, including above/ground, Apt. 9, Gaspereau, corrupt, red ceilings, and many others.  His new mistranslation of Nicolas Guillen's El Gran Zoo is forthcoming from BuschekBooks, and his poetry collection Garden is due this fall with Chaudiere Books. He currently works as Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine and plays guitar and mandolin in the band Call Me Katie. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #47 : D.G. Jones : Nature Tries

two daffodils on the bank beyond
the window, and April
is almost over

I am in the bank account of
fallen leaves, representatives of all
the devalued currency the bank
has created to forestall the collapse
of various
Western economies

the kind of double talk associated with
global warming we octogenarians associate
easily with

our governments, oil & holy writ, and
don’t believe. Still

we’re here like the daffodils, even if
two is not a host, but remains
a reminder that Wordsworth could only speak
for his own

moment in time – as May may say,
nature tries

(April 29, 2013)

D.G. Jones was born in Ontario in 1929. He has won the Governor General’s Award twice (for poetry in 1977 and for translation in 1993). His poetry has also won two QSPELL Awards and the A.J.M. Smith Award. Jones retired from teaching at the Université de Sherbrooke in 1994. He now lives in North Hatley, Quebec. His chapbook, standard pose, appeared with above/ground press in 2002 (reprinted in Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013), and The Stream Exposed With All Its Stones: Collected Poems came out with Vehicule Press in 2009.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #46 : Lea Graham : Note to mclennan from 110 Mill Street Five & Half Years Later

It’s time for the Mill Stream eels'

return to the Sargasso Sea. 

I pen numbers off

Poughkeepsie walls

to my left thigh, keep walking

these wan landscapes

where kill names most water. 

A wedding dress awaits

burning in the utility closet. 

Ottawa pulses across

this Hudson & you there

bend to dandelions, blowing

through Chinatown.

Lea Graham is the author of the poetry book, Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011) and of the chapbook, Calendar Girls (above ground Press, 2006).  Her poems, essays, translations and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Notre Dame Review, Delirious Hem, Southern Humanities Review and Fifth Wednesday. She is a contributing editor for Atticus Review and works as an Associate Professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York where she teaches poetry and travel writing among other exciting subjects.   Lea Graham was born in Memphis, Tennessee and grew up in Northwest Arkansas.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #45 : Brecken Hancock : LAKE EFFECT

Snow blinds the deer hearse.

Snow needles the blood purse.

Snow porridge in the hobo’s bowl.

Snow angels spread for ripper’s toll.

Dormers dripping toilet paper.

Castles of albino crows.

Amniotic impersonator.

Vomit stipples Mommy’s clothes.

Come snow, come sleep,

Bleach our red curtains

To surrender. O molester,

Put the animals to bed.

Bed the trees;

Rid us of forecast.

Calm the alabaster

Masts of dream.

Come dream, snow,

Bear in the cavern,

Rat in the cistern.

Every little chit in its hole.

Make us kid-glove clean again,

Intestines fresh from the fast.

Lay out your skin to swaddle our feet,

Snow Madonnas maquillaged in ash.

Brecken Hancock’s poetry, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Riddle Fence, Event, CV2, Grain, and Studies in Canadian Literature. She is Reviews Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and Interviews Editor for Canadian Women in the Literary Arts.The Art of Plumbing, her most recent chapbook, is out with above/ground press and her first full-length manuscript of poems, Broom Broom, is forthcoming with Coach House Books. She lives and walks dogs in Ottawa.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #44 : Marthe Reed : article of faith

Marthe Reed is the author of three books: (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books 2013), Gaze (Black Radish Books 2010) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer  (Lavender Ink 2007). A fourth book, Pleth, a collaboration with j hastain, will appear September 2013 from Unlikely Books; a fifth will be published by Lavender Ink (2014). She has also published four chapbooks as part of the Dusie Kollektiv; a fifth is published by above / ground press. Her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, New Orleans Review, HOW2, MiPOesias, Fairy Tale Review, Exquisite Corpse, BlazeVOX, and The Offending Adam, among others. An essay on Claudia Rankine’s The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue appears in American Letters and Commentary.  She is Co-Publisher of Black Radish Books.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #43 : Adeena Karasick : With Asura

With asura hath woman a hoarder of giddy tomes

breached locs. cut mouthy and ill-fitting

where dizzy sign’s makeover  re-phrased

with asura

hath woman a tainted parody of her arched will

harpies, floosies

where origin receiveth massage

and the shallow is intrajected by phissin’,

with asura

seeth woman’s vagabond zigzag, her errs and kinky lines

écriture is made to injure and to live in

and it is made to be salient with slurry quixotics

with asura, slink against the naughty denouement,

is thy cred ever more than stalwart gags

is thy misreading daring as precipice,

with mounting treats, strong flavours

with asura the lines grow thick

with asura is curled re-creations

where woman can mine, re-sited for indwelling.

Sewn scattered, coated with

fever ripped by her ludic moor

WITH ASURA

A wooly complex of meerkats

heaped bling, the domain of asura

Asura is an amorous terain, asura

A bonny kneading of the monad’s flan

and steeped with the spinner’s cunning. Perky borrowings

gamed by asura

Ducky kudos gamed by asura

A Pappardelle fracas of swanny bells; by asura

And salsa columns tainted

Gamed by asura, gelled relics, alcoves; came ambrosial phonemes,

Came the kitch of recast stains signs: altered phrases

By asura sauntering trophy memes

By asura, scented hilarity,

Asura wresteth the va-jazzled

It wresteth the rift and the riffing grafts and

It gnaweth the thread of all that blooms

It burneth to weave bold patterns;

A sewer of hottie contours by asura; crammed with moist avoidance, embroiled

Memory fingering Asemia

Asura sleuths, shouldered by whim

And chafes like hungry masks, recruiting

It hath brought pulsing to breed, rife

battling the languerous grid and the bridled gloom

COUNTER RANT: TWIRLY

wrought with horstext for Elusive

Courses a re-set banquet

all beset with asura.

Adeena Karasick is a poet, cultural theorist, media artist and the critically acclaimed author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. She is currently Professor of Pop Culture and Media Theory at Fordham University in New York. Writing at the intersection of Conceptualism and neo-Fluxus performatics, her urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard) and noted for its “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature “syllabic labyrinth” (Craig Dworkin).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan