The crush of consonants

in Tom Daschle & the open

vowels of John Yau have

got me thinking of Mary Ann

Caws who says “Poetry can be

any damn thing it wants”

The treaty of 1868

We are not alone in a room

Being alone is anarchy

I’m certain the mice are

in the ceiling

A bomb instead of a drawing

It snowed last night

The sun today a postscript

If what we remember is

aberration how come I

remember all the dull moments

leading up this gorgeous

feeling of being done

———————

Last night Sueyeun Juliette Lee had a book release party for her new book That Gorgeous Feeling at Higher Grounds Coffee Shop in Northern Liberties, officially one of the oldest suburbs in the country though by today’s standards it certainly wouldn’t strike one as a suburb. It was an enjoyable evening.

A few weeks ago Juliette asked friends if they would write an occasional poem for the event and many of us responded in kind. It was a fine night of poetry that built and built with poems and poems until Juliette read work from her new book and a work in progress (I can’t remember the title, but I do know that her chapbook Mental Commitment Robots is included in the work in progress). The poem above is the occasional poem that I wrote for the party.

Earlier in the day I had gone to listen to a panel on drawing that John Yau was moderating at UArts. On the panel: Joan Waltemath, Molly Dougherty , Simon Frost, and Kim Deitch. I appreciate listening to artists talk about process and materials because they talk about tools, color, and attention in ways that poets rarely do. My poem stole lines of dialogue from the panel’s participants - an approach (stealing people’s conversational lines) that I’ve been getting into lately. Ted Berrigan says he likes to beat people up throughout The Sonnets. I suppose I like to steal people’s lines because people say beautiful and complicated things all the time! Language is material and it is there in “physio-aural” form once someone speaks. I suppose I want to heighten my attention as I move about the day so I listen and write down phrases. Or, is it that the poem wants to heighten my attention? I think when Caws writes that “[p]oetry can be any damn thing it wants” it’s crucial that the agency is not in the person (the poet), but the poem.