PUT SOME VIOLENCE IN YR MORNING POETRY

I spent the better part of yesterday leading a workshop about violence & poetry sponsored by the nd gender-relations center. violence & poetry is potentially a really lame thing to talk about for five hours if what you’re talking about involves a lot of personal sharing, sniffling, shoulder-hugging, etc. I thought it was important for us to write aggressively, not to sink comfortably into victimhood.

 

take a body. tear it apart. make a new body. excise violence, it’s an exercise.

 

ingredients : zirconia (minnis) : the cow (reines) : entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (göransson) : antwerp (bolaño) : sunflower brother (witt) : killing kanoko (itō)

 

a bag of books, eyes closed, everyone picks one & tears the body apart, refashion it, reclaim physicality.

 

here are some of the bodies we made :

 

A Storm Brews in the Kitchen

Thor’s iron chili pot thunders
Burgundy floorboards absorb
Ground beef muffles hurled crystals
Walls weep expensive merlot

Maelstrom almighty blows
Falling rocks, falling bodies
Tyger claws granulate
Wooden harvest etched blood
Testosterone tempest swells
Expletives furiously thrust
And they fuck
And they fuck
And they fuck

Lightning strikes the pond
Bellied fish drift heavenward
My brother takes his first breath

(britt burgeson)

 

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Life’s constants change like the blowing wind is displaced. In an instant things can be backwards. Then, again back towards the direction you want them. Things have an intentional tendency to stop then go and work themselves out. So stop worrying about the HOW and realize it’s about the now. It’s what you make of the moment. Just let the love take hold and show it a good time. I won’t let it down because it won’t let me fall blind but guide me to where I need to be all the time.

(louis botka)

*

The pain was unpleasant.
It always is

 

Its necessary but unwanted,
Important and yet a nuisance.

If experience is the best teacher,
then pain is its method of instruction.

But this is not any type of pain.
It is pain coupled with love.

(colin sideberry)

*

TheColonel’s awful operation crowded the adjacent daughter into
rabid animal
native representative
the photographed mimosa fed erotic
Rifle Me Child, clears TheColonel
goodly godly heavy
shell cleans the cornfield creep
Rinse That Swarm With The Half Pound Shells
but instead i headphone home
a unique ointment,
a cheering blackened passenger

(elizabeth franklin)

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY

wars were never managed into something less human

so perversion rippled down like a piece of trash;

 

an ailment like a latchkey, a lubricant deceived –

 

fortunately whatever affliction can speak

to mouth blank daughters, taste of perforated gallows.

 

a sedative tunnel infected tallow like a wraith;

a child wrinkles loveliness climbed primal & newly cut.

 

to smolder snapped a photograph, a phoneme carelessly

open, an edible organ slipped dormant, a bone.

(this B*tCh)

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