Visuals

‘Exploding Head,’ by Cynthia Marie Hoffman

These poems have a feel for me, a texture. Take the opening lines of “MRA Machine”:

Strapped inside this bright rocket, you are a spirit ready to be launched toward the light.

Do you feel that? In the pacing, in the sound? There’s fear, but there’s also something soothing about the language because of its music.

Hoffman’s prose poems feel like the warp of the subject matter coming together with the weft of the language she uses—language that, in her words, both opens up and clamps down hard. Reading the work is, for me, like running my hand across the face of newly woven fabric, nubbins and knots and all. I’m talking about poems that drape, that shoosh or scritch, that become something sensual, that conceal and reveal. I’m talking about a poet who can make a poem into a garment woven from different types of yarn that readers can step into and then back out again, both ourselves and not ourselves—the you in the poem an internal conversation in second person but also us if we allow ourselves that moment of extension into and beyond, which I willingly and gladly do. What is poetry if not a way to experience the world through a consciousness and creative expression that is not our own?

These poems sley the reed, thread the heddles, and follow the fell line as they take shape on the page as blocks of memory, experience, imagination, and disquiet.

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Images: 1. The front cover of Exploding Head, by Cynthia Marie Hoffman. 2. Two interior pages from the collection. 3. Another image of the front cover of the collection, along with a dried pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass.

Carolyn Kizer

Let’s just call her what she was: a siren, a soothsayer, a mythmaker, a chorus, a riot. I met her. She took a sliver of me. I am but a sliver of her. You will never remove that sliver.

Image: A photo of Carolyn Kizer that ran in Poetry Northwest.

Calligrams

Folks were really reaching to find animals in the stars. I’m glad they did, otherwise we wouldn’t have these calligrams.

Source: Public Domain Review.

Don’t Mess with These Dactyls

Poetry is my weapon. Baby, you don’t wanna mess with these dactyls.

Image: an outline of a left hand with the thumb pointing up, the bottom three fingers folded back, and the index finger pointing out. A long red line (representing a stressed syllable) is above the finger’s bottom bone (proximal phalanx), as well as two red curved lines (representing unstressed syllables) above the middle and upper bones (middle and distal phalanges). Image fromWikipedia and used in accordance with its Creative Commons Universal license.

Cunt Norton, Dodie Bellamy

Why am I scarfing down a whole thing of chocolate hummus all at once? Because I’m reading Cunt Norton, by Dodie Bellamy. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction by Ariane Reines:

This book will make your mouth water.

It will make you want to live, whatever that means. It might even make you want to write.

If bliss could become a book, I mean if a book could become bliss, then this is that book.

I mean that this book is the greatest fuck poem in the English language, and it isn’t even a poem.

Shakespeare is commended to his or their proper androgyny in this book. In this book, Ginsberg is better and gayer than Ginsberg. This book is so happy, it is so beyond gay.

Gender is nothing compared to this book.

If you hear me screaming yes yes yes with my volume maxed out, trust me: I’m just reading this book.

(Personally, I think it is a poem.)

Worthless Words

These are photos of the sculpture at Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri, that I incorporated into a poem titled “The Sculpture.” (It was first published in Muzzle’s 2015 mental-health issue as “The Letter.”)

A patient at Glore made the piece when the hospital was still in operation. I’m visiting the museum in the spring to document the writing on each piece of foamboard along with a diagram that shows where the pieces are situated in the work.

One of the museum’s employees took these photos and sent them to me. I haven’t seen the piece in person since 2015. I’m happy it’s still on display and in good condition. Anything can outlive us. Anything can matter after we’re gone, just as we matter while we’re here. These words are not “worthless,” as the sculpture’s creator says on one of the foamboard strips.

Be the Nudibranch You Want to See in the World

From Kumataro Ito’s Illustrations of Nudibranchs from the USS Albatross’ Philippine Expedition (ca. 1908). What’s your vibe? Which nudibranch are you? Which one do you aspire to be?

Shown: Watercolor illustrations by Kumataro Ito, the chief illustrator aboard the USS Albatross as it surveyed the aquatic resources of the seven thousand islands of the Philippines.

Source: The Public Domain Review.