...And flowers were those things that pulled you out, but
now damp and folded and piled like dams in the morning where it’s
bluish and everything’s one color but not the same amount angry, they
are zones.
I did find myself getting upset at the sameness by which the predominant form unifies most every writing. It's obvious in it's very streamlinedness that great attention has been paid to presentation/pagination, font, spacial design/layout, and how this array of physical aspects affects a prose poetry audience.
The dissection of a whole, consistent or parallel trajectory, then, becomes fundamental to the reading of alice. In reading a volume ( albeit in the wrong direction ), one must recognize that it's the intention of alice to be read only for its letter; one is forced to disregard the look and feel of the thing for its taste, simply, because that superficial edifice attempts, tacitly, to have you have it, is too nice, too easy, too worked on. The presentation is a nice seduction device, a groomed goatee. By character of its very slickness, without avenue to deliberate its illusion.
Each writer, however, is given only the space of two or three pieces to de-homogenize. If, and this is my very only beef with alice, one is to go rooting into hermeneutics ( of a volume's mere physicality ), I want more of the writing that ought amaze, reward the reader. Perform the trick, get the doggie treat.
I may have had a dream last night wherein I thought the writers over at alice blue have a grand 'ol time writing what they write. I think the place, though in this instance, overtends a concern for how a thing is said over what's saying.
Spend some time, take a read at ( in reverse order ) Russell Jaffe, Nate Slawson, Trey Jordan Harris, Jenn Marie Nunes, Ruth Williams.
And it's the waiting game for me as the next Anemone Sidecar ( #14 ) may arrive with two poems ( "The stars think I have a job but I do not" & "Anne Sexton" ). Currently, these two tidbits are having a staring contest with internet limbo and who knows who'll come out on top.
*A treat, goodness, a treat (!) - The Unpublished Book of Blues
Whenever I was in a poem I knew
that other poems would take part
and would have already been other
parts of the universe.
- Duncan ( in a letter to Robin Blaser )
... [A] breath between
tooth and
beak
if
I
could mouth a sound
to form an
I
it would say
my claw
my claw
has been
hurting for days -
if I could count the days -
I would call out for drugs.
