Yes, craft does matter: sequins, archive-quality glue, tiny crepe-paper sakura, scissors, tracing paper, needle-nose pliers, craypas, etc.
Month: March 2007
**A DAZZLING DISPLAY OF HETEROGENEOUS SPLENDOR**
Roof Books invites you
to celebrate the publication of
Folly
by Nada Gordon
on Sunday, April 1, 2007
from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.
at 300 Bowery (between Houston and Bleecker)
HEAR SONGS, SKETCHES, & RECITATIONS
DESIGNED TO EDUCATE, EDIFY, AMAZE, AND UPLIFT
but more importantly
H’ORS D’OEUVRES will be served
as well as a variety of BEVERAGES
festive and/or foolish attire encouraged
“children with facial differences”
(a Katie-like entry)
On the F train this evening, a black woman in her 40s or 50s shaking convulsively and preaching in a Caribbean accent. She wore all white and a white turban. Her faux Louis Vuitton white bag with multicolored emblems took up a sideways row of seats while she stood in front of a visibly furious couple (Jewish, I believe) intoning GOD GOD GOD SATAN SATAN GOD, FORGIVE THESE SINNERS, etc etc. She wasn’t quite in glossolalia mode, but she might as well have been. I thought that someone should come and put a cape around her as if she were James Brown.
I noticed that most of those she was preaching to appeared to be Jewish or Muslim (but of course, who knows).
Once we got to Smith and 9th, the couple she was brandishing her fists and words at tried calling 911 on their cell phones to report her, but to no avail — she headed to other end of the train and got off at 4th Avenue.
I really wanted to turn to the pretty young orthodox Jewish girls sitting next to me with their straightened hair, heavy stockings, and multiple shopping bags from exclusive stores, and say “thin line between religion and mental illness, hmm?” But instead I just said “it’s going to get much colder this week.”
What are you gonna do?
Doesn’t everyone — on some irrational, Ptolemaic level — think that their own constellation of influences is or should be everyone else’s constellation of influences?
This is a big problem!
My items are perfect for costumes, Lolita, French maid, square dance, adult sissy baby, sissy girls, cross dressers, drag queens, Halloween, cosplay, rockabilly, Mardi Gras, fetish, 50’s style, pageants, pouf bunnies, cancan, anime girls, rave, club, pretty boy, big cuties, fantasy.
I tried in two browsers to leave a comment on Ron’s blog re: torque but it just wouldn’t go through. Maybe he’s blocked me? Am I such a troublemaker? Anyway, here’s my two yen:
I was a bit thrown by the meth mention, too, until I un-torqued the sentence a little. At any rate, that would have been an interesting powder in the word salad.
Why don’t more poets under 40 employ much torque (it makes me glad I’m 43 — just made it under the torquing wire!)? A very good question. I wonder, are they afraid of it? Do they feel its usefulness has been played out? Do they find it boring?
I don’t know if it’s because Coolidge, Seaton, et al were like mother’s milk to me, but for me it’s an essential quality to the poeticization (i.e. the calling of attention to itself) of language. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a modern device, either. Milton strikes me as quite torqued, as does Donne. Maybe I am conflating “torque” and “complexity”? Even Byron seems torqued in that the sense in the lines must be twisted around to accommodate the witty rhymes.
If a poet doesn’t torque (v.) it makes me feel that they take grammar for granted, that they haven’t really thought about how to stretch, pummel, rip, dysraph, glue, knead, decorate, and deform it — and that kinda bores me! I want to see maximum attention at the microstructural level, not just a bunch of plain statements sitting there on the page like hard-boiled eggs.
Awkwardness is endearing; gracefulness*, not so much.
(Gracefulness differs from grace, right?)
Scooters, vacation, fall.
The idea that one shouldn’t like language poetry because it is weird or amusing but rather because it opens out rippling utopias of new ways of thinking seems to me incredibly recondite. It spells out L=E=I=S=U=R=E.
See Aragon on novelty, below.
Otohime 