Untoward Arguments

Poetry can be made propositional, not to make
a better poetry, and not to marry novelty
to decency or progress, but to argue a life

that remainders nothing short of poetry, an act
of breaking in, and to our own callow house.

To argue a life made not mean by synopsis
but frank and more wild by a typical result.

7.27.10

What's that?
 ––Deeh.

What's this thing?
 ––Deeh.

In the youngest vocabularies, the sound at the root is a response to the prompt.

Where does this token go when the agreed-upon words crowd it out?

7.26.10

Personae are among the lesser gifts to be auditioned in early childhood.

Limitations

"Bees can remember human faces, but only if they are tricked into thinking that we are strange flowers."

––Harpers Findings, 7.20.10

Readings

"A content affirmation exercise."

Somewhere between irony and forbearance, Steven Farmer turns the perfect phrase to describe the persistent value arbitration within contemporary poetry.

Such valence for this literature that refuses to initialize its variables.

7.25.10

To small life, the child is ambassadorial, with hiyas to a field mouse, as though to extend the sure courtesies one cheerfully renews in a bounded society.

On Revisionism: 3

As our case is not new
Let it ring false

To learn, in something like real time,
the exigencies of potential life.

6

That poetry is open to strong propositions.

5

That poetry is a controlled vocabulary for what fails to come to market.

Manners

What don't I know that I could not say?

What don't I know that I would not say?