History of the Main Complaint

Should I bear a grudge against all those who failed to make the world properly?

Should I bear a grudge for all those who fail to make the world properly?

(Should I 'bear a grudge' 'for all those' who 'fail' to 'make the world' 'properly'?)

49

That it's your job to interpret tears.

48

That poetry is significantly aspirational.

Culture

Clover or abandonware?

Real Curses

Α stipend of consciousness.

Accountancy

'A fragile person with a floating consciousness. There are many of these.'

47

That the poem refutes the longing to redeem it.
 

46

That poetry is to imagine unenforceable principles.

Propinquities

• Its intimacy is unattributed.
• It's intimacy that is unattributed.
• Its intimacy is that it is unattributed.

On the Mother's Side

Knowing a quiet root, the mother refutes the profane with a sidewise glance.

 

*

 

"Mothers are like that" – always unattributed, but only occasionally in scare quotes.

*

A bifocal faith: I believe you, so long as you are what you are.

45

That the total poetry is inevitably disciplinary.

Careers

Fictions speciate too, to displace and supplant where the mind will not behold an ecosystem.

Like Andrade's hummingbird, a "flying prism", displaced in turns by the mall rat. As accompanists, there's still here the off-crust of our musical world. Then the invention takes root – the mall rat first a soprano, then eventually a director.

On Dancing

Be confident and glad.

Don't live as if you have a face of rotten teeth.

44

That the remarks be, like Ponge's soap, susceptible.

43

That the melancholy of the prototype is the dispensation of the work's society.

Ingenuity

Who said that for nothing?

Peeping Mot: Available from Apogee Press

First assembled and composed in this forum, Peeping Mot is now a perfect-bound paperback book, published by Apogee Press.

Available from Small Press Distribution or Amazon.

Like the cast of characters A Maxwell has here assembled (Robert Walser, Aaron Kunin, Rene Char, Sir Thomas Browne, and more), PEEPING MOT is a collection of brilliant and occult profundity. Its propositions admirably reinvent the paternal, make a wry and deep inquiry into the function of poetry, and wield the epigram as Chinese box, as koan. It is a book of uncommonly beautiful language and enigmatic intelligence, packed with soft surprises.  – Maggie Nelson

***

Bill Mohr, the terrifically energetic and generous historian of Los Angeles microliteratures and poetries was kind enough to put down these thoughts after receiving a copy last week.