Skunk Hour? WTF?

Nada Gordon4 Comments

Today there was a lunchtime presentation at Pratt on the topic of close reading. It was a mostly interesting discussion, except that one of the presenters mentioned she had students reading sonnets by John Berryman (OK, whatever) and… er…Kim Addonizio… and that she also gives students several poets’ close readings of Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” as well as the poem itself. Why is this *crap* still being used as models of poetry for impressionable young minds? She also brought in a handout of poems she uses for close readings including some Russel Edson, some Plath, “Red Wheelbarrow” and “In a Station of the Metro”. Has no one yet figured out that these are both execrable poems, whose inflated historical importance may be their only virtue? oh GAWD. I want to SMASH THE BORING FUCKING CANON ALREADY. I can almost see myself in Doc Martens kicking everything and slamming at POETRY with a baseball bat. If you can’t teach people to read everything poetically, which would, I feel, be an exhilarating goal, at least give them some poetry to read that won’t make them think poetry is this awful monotonous whiny self-important thing. “Skunk Hour” — aaaaagh! SAVE ME!!!!!

Nada’s Anti-Rules of Poetry Blogging

Nada Gordon8 Comments

Avoid any mention of poetry altogether.

Do not use standard templates unless you tweak them.

Use as many fonts as you please.

There is no such thing as irrelevant content: found text, recipes, videos, random observations – all good.

It doesn’t matter if you have links or not.

Especially, do not ever ever “engage current debate.”

Welcome comments, but delete as you see fit.

Use gimmicks: a flickr badge and a label cloud are signs of a “quality blog.”

Don’t set yourself up as an authority on anything.

Let people secretly guest-blog as you.

Blog as frequently or as infrequently as you please: you owe no one anything.

You may use your blog as a catalogue of pet peeves if you like.

Possibly to be continued…

Pinky and Banana, after the Underwear

Nada Gordon2 Comments

How can I respond to this, except with a poem?

Pinky and Banana, after the Underwear

He carried her toast all the way home,
over the scum of a flip and into the hair’s spastic disgrace,
which knew him to be a sod and so
sent him aloft without a winkie of depravity—

along Fridays with nothing on below, toward the hairy elbow glow
from the boring critics, the Spinners in their narcotic
spry hump, the losers with carking slats and uncertain fawns.

He had predilections:
enormous titties to be sent by endive; a great
piece of meat; the largest boob movement ever seen, and this fright
like a bad metaphor creeping through arrogant volleys
of a baby boomer; a clit off the fake
near the fishy engulfment,
which meant nothing at all; the slavish and asinine ignorance
of his adopted druthers and misses. He pretended
to mop her
with a grape in the clumps where obdurate fun battened down—
She squealed; he squeezed her endive. Later she would recall

how it is a sod saves a moron,
while sucking a labia from his breast or giving head to
an aesthete through the radishes of brine: through that trickery,
a wending of might where Verizon meets the sound
beneath one’s meat,
the Moddess would make mentals forget they were mental,
so that she could forget she was not a dachsund and could fart
if she wished, could somersault dismissively
in the empty mind; and imagine, instead, that the way from here
to there was fractious and
as long as her feet: longer by far than she had ever smelled
on her own.

Green Parrots with Red Mouth

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Green Parrots with Red Mouth

The growling grass in Spring must be like green and thredded silk.

The bulberry trees bent their green branches.

We would be two love birds flying wing to wing on high

The white-feathered egrets flying over broad water fields

yellow Oroloes warble
HIGN in the shadowy summer woods

Phoenixes came to sing once on
phoenix terrace.

The phoenixes are gone but still rock
on the rivers waves.