Flarf of spam messages
Hi. I see that you don’t update your website too often. Recently one of my clients, a retired member of the Angola’s state oil firm (SONANGOL) mandated me to move and re-invest his liquid assets to a country with high economic possibility for investment and profit purpose as well as safe keeping to be managed …
Lyrics: Andrew Bird
We often overlook how important poetry is in our society. Our identities are nearly unthinkable without the poetic, artful language that we share. We just don’t call it poetry. We call it slogans. We call it sayings. And above all, we call it lyrics. Take the pop violinist and singer Andrew Bird. Here is a …
Shopping alone when you are five
The world must be so exciting for her. I try to imagine how she experiences the shops, the distance to the riverside park or the large playground, the roads full of traffic, the market. Buying a snack in the corner store is something trivial for us, a relatively meaningless act we won’t remember. It’s no …
The Impossible Art of Instagram Poetry
Poetry adapts. It can permeate every medium, play with every medium, turn every medium into its proper form. There is no need for a theoretical underpinning. Poetry can. But poetry can not just “be”. It has to happen, too. All the efforts to put poetry on the street, among the ‘normal people’ hinge on what …
Trompsky #4
Welcome back professor Trompsky, how was your month, I think it has been a month since we have seen each other? – How was yours? [chuckles and murmurs] To be honest with you, sir, it has been terrible. I was terrified by all the suspicious packages addressed to the president’s opponents, the horrendous rhetoric of …
The Slackted Poetry of Martijn Benders
if all hope is abandoned and you lay awake watching the Contenders play tapes of some obscure rock band you’re welcome to enter and check out this slender, delicate verse with metaphors galore like a Roman brothel frothing incantations through the door Benders puts his fledgling words in a titanium blender and renders magic, genre-bending …
Reading: River by Sharon Black
In the depths of the Internet I found a poetry competition called “Poetry on the lake” that published last year’s winning poems. I am impressed enough to read one here. River To enter naked is to feel no shock, no swift laceration – more a swallowing of the self, a softening of edges by metallic tang …
Nostalvember
Today I found this: Growl Now that I am lowered into my trench language I become an invocation. I am muscles and tendons, a pressurized blood machine, slowly releasing what was stored between the apostrophes, like a captured animal. I am a cormorant of the apocalypse, a confessing nihilist. Opinions grow on me like frozen …
Professor Trompsky #3
Professor Trompsky, welcome. I guess you are a regular on our show now. – Yes you could say that [chuckles] Just before this interview, you said you had a mediocre ephiphany. Care to elaborate? – Yes. Consider thissimple question. Would you increase your happiness at the cost of another’s happiness? I guess not. – But isn’t …
Reading: Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbery
John Ashbery (1927-2017) was, to many, one of the greatest modern American poets. Famous New York School poet. Pulitzer Prize. Look him up! I read a gentle poem called Paradoxes and Oxymorons: This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or …
Reading: Beauty by Tony Hoagland
Saddened by the death of Tony Hoagland (1953 – 2018), the sharp and witty American poet, I read one of his poems today. Beauty When the medication she was taking caused tiny vessels in her face to break, leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks, my sister said she knew she would never …