She woke up desirous of having acute control of mise en scène. She wanted to become a film director / cinematographer, and to live a future of more linearity and clarity. That night she explained her new found vision to her parents at the dinner table (glazed ham and haricots verts with herb butter).
Her mother said no, her fate was already sealed, and it was fatal. Her father added that she would come to her senses, and that it would rain intermittently tomorrow.
She arose, hovered over her parents, and said: call me Ozymandius . . . behold, and look upon me . . . She let out a little roar and poured the gravy over the table. She waved her hands, then laid hands on her parent’s heads and screamed: voila! Her parent’s heads disappeared, but their bodies quivered in an apoplectic dance.
She joined them, and they danced through the night.
What I’m Reading:
The total heat-trapping potential of the atmosphere is now 51.5 percent higher than in 1990, when United Nations scientists first warned the world was on track for catastrophic climate change.
— World Meteorological Organization / “Greenhouse gas concentrations surge again to new record in 2023” / Press Release
I think it’s a good idea to know what the Bible actually says because—while yes, it may be inspiring to you—it’s also the book Americans often misuse to help usher in fascism. Better knowing the book could help resistance efforts. It’s also full of mythology and poetry and archetype, all of which writers use to strengthen our work.
— Jericho Brown / “Writing Advice, Book Recommendations, and More from the Newest Literary MacArthur Fellows” / lithub.com
I want a poem that is a warning, a poem that makes me check to see if I left the shotgun by the door, a poem that’s a runny nose, a sneeze, a poem that’s the moment the sky turns green.
— Kenyatta Rogers / “Ars Poetica”
In the search for a communal metanarrative-innumerable think pieces, roundtables, and interviews on the condition of the written word in America—we risk suffocating the possibilities of the poetic form and idiosyncratic writing generally.
So a time of normative discourse must give way to a time of radical action.
A period of studied subcultural formation must transition into a period of frenetic individualism that drives us toward unpredictable expressions and collaborations.
— Seth Abramson & Jesse Damiani / “Series Editors’ Introduction” / BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing
… I know I am bound to the ritual world—in my dreams I teach myself how to swallow a sword and I stack the stones until they make a cairn.
— Lara Mimosa Montes / “The Cairn”
You wake from a nightmare with a certain relief. But that doesnt erase it. It’s always there. Even after it’s forgotten. The haunting sense that there is something you have not understood will remain long after.
— Cormac McCarthy / Stella Maris
All right. Try this, Then. Every body I know and care for, And every body Else is going To die in a loneliness I can’t imagine and a pain I don’t know. We had To go on living.
— James Wright / “Northern Pike”
I want to confirm that the system, on its own, is *not* good enough. You are not wrong, it is not your fault, and the fact that you struggle is not because you are not good enough, or that you haven’t hustled hard enough. Corporations are running the show, and democracy is turning into oligarchy.
But I still want to say, Keep writing anyway. Keep making art. Keep creating music. Not as a direct act of political resistance, necessarily. But as a way of prioritizing yourself, your inner life. As a way of accessing realities beyond this society controlled by unimaginative powers. I still think it matters.
— Ling Ma / “Writing Advice, Book Recommendations, and More from the Newest Literary MacArthur Fellows” / lithub.com
What I’m Listening To:
Police get taller A shanty town Soldier get longer A shanty town Rudeboy a weep and a wail A shanty town
thee ai generated jesus splits the firestorm boy you wish you could be there or not the sides of his head shaved looking oh so 2024 why are your eyebrows so long a yappy dog barks somewhere outside wait for the storm surge it’s bound to set a new record hope that wound doesnt scar too bad like peppermint bark ice cream on a freezing winter day
What I’m Reading:
It’s an inversion of Warhol: no longer can we say only that anything, properly framed, is art, but rather that art can manifest instantaneously in any frame. Art is, in effect, anyone it wants to be, anywhere and at any time.
— Seth Abramson & Jesse Damiani / “Series Editors’ Introduction” / BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing
It starts out with a static preambulation—if there is such a thing. Somehow you’ve got to get started and this is as good a way sans a definite destination. Just a vagueness, something enveloped in the low cloud cover below, or fog if you’re at ground level—or terrestrially bound—not cruising at 33,000 feet as I’m doing now, and listening to St. Vincent. Because why not. Why not this and why not now, here over the Atlantic Ocean, that is, a sliver of South Carolina’s piece of it, on the precipice of Georgia’s Atlantic—and Florida bound eventually, specifically SoFla, and then pinned to Miami by the bay—Biscayne Bay, on Brickell Bay Drive somewhere. That’s where I’ll be. But thou shall not—the endless knot / endless not. Something like.
These are some words to later shape, remix, smooth out into a writerly canker sore. Yes, that’s it — a writerly canker sore.
Thee old hometown.
What I’m Reading:
GUY: You know what else is great, by the way? Solid food. A Saltine. A sardine. We probably take almost everything in existence for granted. A million miracles at work in this room, right now, easily. You can almost hear them. Wowee. Your body produced 5 million red blood cells in the time since I said “Wowee.” You will produce two swimming pools’ worth of saliva in your life. (Very brief pause.) Use it wisely.
What can I offer? A warring world where life is bereft of meaning. Father on an amphetamine-fueled jag. Mother, a dark figure, a smoke-like wraith moving through the house. I stare and move my crayon to the din of caffeinated voices, a garbled television, a tinkling piano. The house is old and made out of coquina painted pale green. I’m shoehorned in between them, and perched on the edge of my seat. A whippoorwill spits an urgent call. She will come in and check for irritation at 9:10. Overnight the snow will turn to slush, then a sheath of ice.
What I’m Reading:
Times is hard.
Hard people makes hard times. I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away.
Darkness envelops the visit from my dead father. He says psychic automatism betrayed him—the paranoiac- critical debased him. We count
the shadows of ghosts untethered from the sheets over their heads— one forgot to cut the eyeholes out— a blind ghost singing off-key from a torn hymnal. We cram
communion hosts in our maws— this batch overcooked / oversalted— our holy pockets full then empty. We wade
ankle deep in wafers to the vestry. It’s snowing outside. We sink through the floor. We forget what we’ve forgotten.
What I’m Reading:
The dream wakes us to tell us to remember. Maybe there’s nothing to be done. Maybe the question is whether the terror is a warning about the world or about ourselves. The night world from which you are brought upright in your bed gasping and sweating. Are you waking from something you have seen or from something that you are?
there’s no Walmart in Afghanistan, said the father, because there’s a target at every corner
— Aria Aber / “Operation Cyclone, X. Catalogue of Grief” / Hard Damage
If everyone on the planet had agreed to wear a mask and keep six feet apart from one another for a given period of time—and a short time at that—Covid wouldn’t have had a chance, she said. Now it’s too late, and it’s the most vulnerable among us who don’t have a chance.
Years from now, the doctor said, I believe people will look back on all this and see it as yet another example of human barbarism. (Note the hopeful assumption that our descendants will be more humane than we are.)
— Sigurd Nunez / The Vulnerables
hello comrade said the Soviets holding your mother at gunpoint hello comrade the wind is crisp on my face holding hands in the bathtub as the red army kicks in the door
if at least the Americans or Brits had colonized our country if life had been well-meaning and good to us if you were a kinder person, then
look for the ancient guests in your mind look for the war in the face of your mother look for the words, the words that fail you forever
— Aria Aber / “Operation Cyclone, X. Catalogue of Grief” / Hard Damage
Over a hundred thousand people died today. When we try to think about that, we probably forget that a hundred thousand people died yesterday. And a hundred thousand the day before that. There are a hundred thousand people who’ve been dead for three days. The coffee cakes and casseroles from friends are slowly disappearing; the families and loved ones, heading back to work, returning the odd phone call. People are plodding along, in the face of such total… Oh, but we’re not here to mope, right? We’re here to listen to music and drink some grape juice, maybe get a free T-shirt.
— Will Eno / Wakey, Wakey
Light went in a long bright wink upon the knifeblade as it sank with a faint breath of gas into bis belly. He felt suddenly very cold. The dogs had gone and there was no sound in the night anywhere. Minister? be said. Minister? His assassin smiled upon him with bright teeth, the faces of the other two peering from either shoulder in consubstantial monstrosity, a grim triune that watched wordless, affable. He looked down at the man’s fist cupped against his stomach. The fist rose in an eruption of severed viscera until the blade seized in the junction of his breastbone and he stood disemboweled. He reached to put one hand on the doorjamb. He took a step backwards as if to let them pass.
— Cormac McCarthy / Outer Dark
… “Keep safe.” What a ridiculous concept! There is no “safe.” At any moment the fragile thread by which we dangle may break, and we may plummet into the unknown. “Safe,” the word, ought to be outlawed. It gives people false ideas.
— Margaret Atwood / “Widows” / Old Babes in the Wood
What once was your hospital now is ash. Long, thick layers of it, ash violet and wayward as snow, so hard, its violence, it begins to clot. Here, the air
cauterizes even the stones among us.
— Aria Aber / “Operation Timber Sycamore” / Hard Damage
What I’m Listening To:
Searching for Satori The kick in the eye I am the end of reproduction Given no direction Every care is taken In my rejection Kick in the eye
Title these oracular (modular) keywords and trending torts, intensely focused on micro-modal matters of textuality beyond sexuality.
Let’s talk Altered Nymph Ridge.
I can take the transmission of AI sextets (think Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes) and, after stripping it of its networked identifiers and contracts, it’s immediately indexed by my Mr. Microphone and Maestro Calixto, and entered backing-up into the stasis of the Manco de Lepanto. My local ecology being truly international.
Now, say I take that same transmission and upload a corduroy Joycean download of two plaits on a plate Beckett-style, in opposite settings of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, something like tykes who spend their time honeybee warping and wrapping wax effigies of Murder Hornets—each marked accordingly and left untouched in congealed fondue. Goo goo goo joob.
(Get the drift?)
See how my theft sits untouched on a PC while the newscasters subsidy untold chapters of Breaking News without subtext or textural charm.
Remain sovereign and unchanged. Un-harnessed. Un-harassed while the code in your DNA is cracked. You shall be stripped of your inherent charm and converted into plant food (though, not Soylent Green—as you know that’s already been processed—and it’s people!)
I detest a (random) deletion. I theorize a tanka theft. I remix a rejoinder. I even write a writ of mandamus, but never translate a tract. I’ll always delete a didactic dactyl. Eradicate an emaciated ekphrasis. And veto a villanelle (ALWAYS!).
So take that theft of your theft and somehow weathercock it back to me, it might very well be more unrecognizable than my Altered Nymph Ridge out of the WNW.
And DON’T TOUCH MY ALTERED NYMPH RIDGE.
What I’m Reading:
The uncreative writer cruises the Web for new language, the cursor sucking up words from untold pages like a stealth encounter. . . With one click of a button, these soiled texts are cleaned and ready to be redeployed for future use.
— Kenneth Goldsmith / “Revenge of the Text” / Uncreative Writing
thee istsfor manity reader 