Six poems by J. D. Nelson

friendship artichoke listener

the can of ham is a new amazing hup
open it up for disgusted guests
there’s nothing to digest

this is my specialty
disappearing from view

I’m buying another planet
& my western lobes are tingling

earth is a many mirrored h.o.b.e.
with linus the real seventh

now we have a brain
and in the brain an egg
and in the egg a beast

 

the roving hand is a hard rock lucky

wood you start
the famous tree to disguise the art

the fighting tree
the words were like diamonds in the poem

and that something is the morning of the rain
the key to the brain being online and wet-wired

that rainbow is the ticking hand
what is white rice

 

half of them are in the belly by now

that head was a light burg so they say
this was the best earth could do at the time

be careful with the words
whip nice eggs

that hand is the strumming hum of all together
the rest of the poem

why is the miracle not a flash in the air
this tucker machine is the light of the basic

 

no standing up straight for six months

scrape the episode to connor the mine
that’s the feather of one flight

one gum to shrimp up the candlemaker backwards
the demanding face of the coloring book fuse

we can see the trouble in the trees
we will see the sun in the window

that could be the good foam now
in the bottom of the drawer

 

the careful kicking of the compliant featureless deeves

to start a fire with the loud mouth
the mud for my backpack

try unleashing your powers ok
unless you have the cracked apple

the world is a better button maker
to be the dark proctor of these exams

the sky is the terrible noun
earth is a borrowed toad

 

the dollar pigs

the king fork was a rock
not yes, not no

hot leech to print the fortune banner now
help with the magic and algebra

motion us thru the doctor lamb method
the hilltop sound of moore smith the james

you know a little bomb
a crisp onion curd

lack was a moat warp
brannan earth was a copier

 

bio/graf

 

J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. Visit http://www.MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published poems. Nelson lives in Colorado.

Dressing, by Anon

Ongoing work by Darius Molark. Part One

PART ONE – The Ringing Thud Where with Enabling the Idiot to Speak

SO he asked himself why he would take up such an audacious project like that to question the party line and become and authority on something he didn’t at first know about but was suspicious that there was a string of knowledge involved that would lead him to a place allowing him to understand his own humanity and a way to get closer to her but for no other purpose at that point he stopped thinking and stiffed up another line of mexican brown and went about placing the chairs and things about the room in stoic order because the day was the day she was coming and bringing the kids over and checking him out to make sure he wasn’t on drugs and that she could allow him to be a father again to their two kids and maybe even when the kids were asleep on the sofa allow him to touch her again like it had been that day they had first met on the school grounds and he was researching some complicated project of which he did not want to tell her who was then an assistant to the associate librarian person in the school library.

This was a period when they didn’t allow people of his kind on the campus because the people were too stupid and didn’t know what to do with items such as a brick a book a stick and a pencil with an eraser that once you started you could go back to the beginning and erase everything that yesterday you thought was important like when they were lying in the grass behind the school’s lavatory the only place where they could really be in private and he placed his hand up her brown orphan skirt that dressed her to the knees like a bag only the spell at that place stanked in a most odoriferous way so like that had to make quiet whoopee if only to recover the things they once thought loss.

(You had to get over it. It was a an important responsibility to be that way. It was really heavy. At one time truly miserable and also purely pleasurable.)

He smiled at her and kissed the kids and the first thing she noticed was that he would not look her in the eye as he sat the kids on the sofa and turned open the pages of a big book on exotic animals like the ones you could find any day at the zoo.

She looked at him carefully to note if there were any change in his natural rhythms or if he were imperceptibly scratching all over his body and she went into the kitchen to get the paper plates and to cut up the slices of ham and bread that she had bought for lunch for the kids because she knew he would probably not have any food in the house but two cans of beer, one of the cans already opened and sitting dangerously at the edge of the kitchen sink. He and the kids were enjoying each other, laughing at the pictures

Sometimes while they were in class she noticed that he would begin scratching all over, first starting at the back of his hands then going to his thighs and one long scratch would lead to his chest and then hers and like the next thing she knew he was tearing off her brassiere and squeezing the little mounds he found bringing intense enjoyment to her.

By the time he had her panties off, from the tall grass they noticed the dignified figure going into the outdoor lavatory and they waited and listen and then came, as they expected, a long tearing sound as if the earth were finally in remiss and then with one great push was getting everything out.

They clamped their noses by which time he was inside her pumping her with all the care and sweetness of a truck driver gone blind because he had found such beauty and sweetness in the road which is not ordinary. After they showed them how to feed the breech then they would have what to do after firing like picking up the shells or making the people clean up the soldiers’ defilement from the streets with a tooth brush.

The other reason he was doing the project was so he could make enough money to take the kids to Riverview Park on the north side of Chicago where they could go on the various rides, one freely associated with another.

After the first whiff of pain and sound traveled over them they unclamped their noses and holding her firmly on the hips both of them could feel her coming as if Michelangelo had finally, finally, hooked up David with the creator, who despondent that day, figured neither of them had a chance to meet each other so that he may depart the spirit of life from his fingers to the chest of Michelangelo. The documentary pointed out how the Crow Indians would always steal the horses of whatever tribe was in the neighborhood and that this was important in showing off and developing skills of the young warrior into manhood.

The third part of the project, the reason he was doing it was to counteract all thoughts that they were docile. But actually on the day in 1919, October, he told her how the bivouacked soldiers had kept their guns and pistols and from the Wabash YMCA had kept the mad people from coming into their community by taking pot shots at them their their Springfield rifles.

After they had finished and saw the anointed one leave the lavatory a huge wave of ennui struck upon him but his member was still hard. She cautioned him not to do anything any more because she was late from her position as assistant to the associate librarian who laughed and crackled every time she saw the little boy come into the library and tried to check books out at that time when people of his ilk were not allowed.

It was a dangerous period because he could feel the wanting to know arising in him, bursting, actually, all the sinews of his brain and later his income. In come this, in come that. In come love and outcomes baby. Then a job and a family house. He had to wait in the line of the filthy underneath the viaduct on 67th street to buy his mexican brown from Deck and then the thing was to try to escape from the little kids in the neighborhood who had been hiding there behind the viaduct to jump on them and take their dope from them. This is why they tried to purchase in groups, when they were standing in groups like three of them at a time to get through the gauntlet of sadness and mad human beings who had a lot of passion that had to be placed under control by the dope or else they would fall away and be displaced.

Two poems by Kushal Poddar

On Instructiveness

Tim reads the instructions manual for death –
‘Live fully, first step.’

It is a chirping feather that reveals
a bird came to the window to proclaim –
‘Rain would visit; today a Sunday;
art acts free of instructiveness,
theories, politics, choice.

Tim turns and sleeps; believe me,
dream features a war psychedelic
between what he desires and where hate flips
a coin with two heads.

 

Night-lamp Is On

Every throb in my head
taps a prosign, connotes an SOS,
and on the sleep’s askew rhythm
an iceberg sinks an ocean
to the surface too real to forget.

Let’s spell elusiveness as translucence.
My darkness threads the night’s flesh.
In the fish exists everyone ever drowned
and it swims inside me.
Let the bait think itself a top predator.
I sleep not therefore I am never fully awake.

..

Authored ‘The Circus Came To My Island’, ‘A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Understanding The Neighborhood’, ‘Scratches Within’, ‘Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems’, ‘Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems’ and now ‘Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel’ (Alien Buddha Press)

Author Page – amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe

The phone box, by Tom Bland

was perfect on the outside,
not one of those red ornate ones, the black and silver metal, more of a frame than a
box, I was already inside puking up my guts after taking two long lines of ketamine.
“I was trying to find an insight to justify the grotesqueness
of the experience.”
“Sometimes acknowledging the grossness is the insight,” my therapist said.

During my clown training, we named
every facial expression we made first in the mirror then to each other;
the teacher noting them all down to the point
where in a performance, he shouted a name,
and we made
that face
towards the audience so
they too learnt the power to
control our features, the exaggerated heightened
emotion
pushing our skin into its shape.
I found myself
a demon in front of an audience: “I only had a
standard joke to play with.” I wanted them
to experience the terror ripping out
of their/our gut.

My therapist remained silent. I
went to the toilet, staring at her toothbrush, her husband’s toothbrush,
her child’s toothbrush, and three types of toothpaste.
I came back into the silence, sitting down,
composing myself, she asked,

“Why are you training to be a psychotherapist?”

I felt something curdling inside my gut: the image of me on all fours puking on her Russell
and Bromley’s patent shoes. She could see I was seeing something.

She told me she had a client who leapt off the chair onto the floor rolling into a ball. She just
handed him a piece of paper and a pen. HELP ME. HELP ME! My whole body wanted to
do
the same,
but my mind turned back the impulse into the seat I was already in.

My friend had lent me a circular LED light on a stand, which I set on
strobe, placing
a zombie mask over it. For the whole night, I sat on my
bed just staring hoping it might make
me write something
but nothing came except a splitting headache
: “Everyone
thinks nothingness is light, but it weighs of everything that is absent,”
I read
somewhere.

“Melancholia was Freud’s closest idea to saying ghosts
were real,” one of my tutors said before speaking about one of his clients
who took his own
life. “He was always attempting to find images so he could
distort reality, but the more you distort,
the more obvious it becomes.”

I saw a client who kept saying “no” whenever
I tried to interpret. I asked, “Why
do you always say no?” And he said, “I don’t,” just staring at me.
“Don’t fuck
with what has already taken shape, even if it is wrong,” an artist
said spitting out the end of his cigarette. He bent his head
onto the
ground photographing his face next to the wet butt. “I really
want to masturbate over the slimy end,” his mouth said.

Two poems by Fran Lock

poem for an ideal reader

“how to create through writing an enduring extinction”- Miyó Vestrini

reader, accomplice in a thought crime,  sway,
witless, to my severest music. i will go away.
i will go where the air is clean. for a long time:
a crisis that renders all our disappointments
fatal. the lipstick, fatally smudged, the dress shirt,
fatally creased, the electric fan, fatally misdirected.
reader, i desire you how the poem desires you:
erratically, and forever. with teeth. you, fleshscape,
me, david croneberg. to incite your extinction,
over and over, that mixtape mumble. confusion
reigns. this, capital’s ideal carnality, love in
the precinct of monster gods, of men with gills,
of women with webbed earlobes. whatever.
there are pigeons befouling the lcd signs.
to be written into oblivion against necessity
in an angry font, all caps. and all the lemon-
coloured birds our sky is starved of. country,
wild and imprecise. persistence? pah! mess
of soft bones vulnerable to vertigo.
an ambulance, moaning like a melancholy
organism. early morning hours make
priests of us all. don’t give me your lust,
your dishevelled clemency.  finger under
a collar. come convulsively to grief.
there are cliques whose kiss is after
all a mute defrauding. what i want
from you is no longer love. there is no daring
to your desire, dear. i want you ungainly,
diseased. i want you, self-important ugliness;
that heat, that saccharine hostility. i want
your trembly rage over petty things, all,
all of your kitschy syndromes and gestures.
a colossal mistaking, want. oh, to say
shit you rather than fuck you, is my highest
ideal. i thought about blinding myself,
to be released from this storm of seeing.
the eye as an attack surface, keeps
filling me up with you. i want the tundra,
to be becalmed in your tedious green.
unfold me for my fortunes along each
sweating crease.

,,

..

 

citizen citizen

“The catastrophe is not coming, it is here.” – The Invisible Committee.

woke, exfoliated cold, sat and waxed
her professional body. today, no more
decrees. only eulogies and anecdotes,
anthologies and manuals. to menace
with a series of sexless grunts, the kitten
faces of her readers. a poem is an advert,
what it’s selling is the future. even our
ghosts are correcting their period
costumes. the traitors. but fucker,
the dead understand that there is
still an alchemy to error. in a muted
light a soft-core wrongness prevails.
the editor is a white rabbit with
a hypnotist’s watch.  she must not
remember: the years of infamous
hunger, a flickering city, an enlarged
liver dying on a trolley. why bother?
sit instead, premeditate a common-
place all afternoon. communicate,
they said. such useful art. a word
is abject chamomile. weak heat
for shallow wounds. fucker, she says,
you insomniac smut-peddler, pepsi-
cola spokesman, hawking your spiteful
pulp. king xerox, pharaoh eating honeyed
locusts from the pages of a fanzine.
before the awards are given, she fusses
her narrow skin, the mirror’s vigilante.
is neither one thing nor the other.
they said, for years. and now each
metaphor, a cherry-ripe obscenity.
they said, they said. from nights
of balmy adolescent privilege,
holding an iphone six like a frog
prince. snivelling collective we.
and they said, and they said.
the pretend contempt of judges;
the prim intemperance of post-
doctoral lushes. a laugh like heavy
furniture being dragged inexpert.
she says: fucker, all names are dead.
poetry is digging shit with a golden
shovel.  you falsifiers, patting
yourselves down for imperfections,
night after night. fucker, fuckers
of inflatable consciences, if your
eyeliner is inseparable from your
politics then you’re not a comrade:
you’re canned air sold for a buck
ninety-nine, you’re a hair clot cut
from drains, you’re banal and explicit
and anything scrawled on the night.
she says she remembers: a blatant
hell, priest with his seamless
conjugal philosophy, his weepy
scriptures about nothing; the nuns
as white as laboratory mice,
lifting their pink eyes to a trophy
ceiling. where pure and intact
mean precisely the same. fuck
you, she was multiply sullied here.
and a body isn’t optional. it’s gristle,

…

Four poems by Mark Young

A line from Albert Camus

If we build a light rail away
from the festival’s epic main
stage, it is possible it may
emerge into a cyber warfare

world & infest attics & gardens—
an example is the Fandango
Facebook bot on Messenger.
The stage-sets collapse. Then

comes the familiar resident
grumbles about movie trucks
& trailers disrupting the day
to day activities of their

neighborhoods & the taking
away of their right to bear
witness. Farmers add another
concern: the return of wolves.

..

road rage punch-up

Gritty crashing the Flames’
broadcast may be one of
the most overused tropes

in popular pharmacy, but it
still keeps your guitar, bass,
or other stringed instrument

safe, even when a police
dog comes flying off the
top rope to bite your assets.

..

is suggestive of

I go to the issuu site
of the issue of a
journal I am in

& am invited to
let lots of hot
russian ladies

grow my business
on line, & am also
let know that beaut-

iful thai ladies are
available to marry me
if I convert to a pdf.

..

inappropriate calories

It’s a magic number. No, not
three, which seems to have
assumed the position because
of children’s shows & De la

Soul & Blind Melon, amongst
the many who have risen to
fame on the back of that claim.
We’re actually unsure of what

the magic number really is. Let’s
call it X, let’s say it varies. Like
how many people on a bridge
before it starts to wobble. Or

how long it takes for high heels
to start hurting. Or bad style in
source code. Which means this
piece will probably not compute.

..

 

Mark Young lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia, & has been publishing poetry since 1959. He is the author of around fifty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages. His most recent books are The Perfume of The Abyss from Moria Books; A Vicarious Life — the backing tracks from otata; taxonomic drift from Luna Bisonte Prods; & Residual sonnets from Ma Press of Finland.

The perfume of the abyss by Mark Young Reviewed by Clara B. Jones

The perfume of the abyss
Mark Young
2019
Moria Books
76 pp
$12.95 (lulu.com)

Reviewed by Clara B. Jones

“[Surrealism is] psychic automatism in its pure state…dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” André Breton

Graduate student: Hi, professor.

Professor: Welcome back! Is anything wrong? You sounded breathless over the phone.

GS: I imagine so—i am excited but, also, concerned. I think I have found a thesis topic but am not sure that you will approve.

P: Ah! You’ve been struggling with this since last semester—what have you come up with?

GS: Well, my partner and I went to Berlin on holiday and stayed in the boutique hotel, Hommage à Magritte…

P: …interesting, sounds like fun!

GS: It was! And, I came across a book in the hotel bookstore that I think might allow me to explore the French Symbolist movement! The author is an Australian, Mark Young, a poet and editor, and his collection, The perfume of the abyss, gave me a lot of ideas for research. The book’s title is the title of one of Magritte’s paintings.

P: Oh! I read his brilliant vispo volume, les échiquiers effrontés, last year. I believe he is a student of Surrealism, not, Symbolism, though the two movements are related. “…effrontés” was inspired by Marcel Duchamp. What about “…abyss?”

GS: Magritte, of course, though, the book is heavily coded and there are direct or indirect references to many other artists—writers and painters, mostly, and their works.

P: What topic have you considered? Surrealism began in the 1920s, after World War I, and was influential until the mid 1960s. That is a lot to cover in a Master’s thesis, don’t you think?

GS: Well, yes, and no. I want to use Young’s symbolism to explore its contribution to the themes of the unconscious, dreams, and reality throughout the history of contemporary art.

P: Ummm, that is very ambitious. You will need to condense your ideas to something manageable for a 1-year project. How about limiting yourself to the relationship between Surrealism’s view of the unconscious and reality as Young interprets it in his new book?

GS: Yes, that sounds like a good plan. Where should I start?

P: I would suggest that you begin with the French writer, Guillaume Apollinaire, who influenced the poet, André Breton, the primary developer of Surrealism. A Belgian Marxist, Breton was closely associated with Magritte and  others, several of whom combined a commitment to radical politics with dedication to their creative work.

GS: Do you consider Young to be a Surrealist—what would that mean, anyway?

P: You will be the expert on those questions when you receive your degree. However, based upon my reading, you will want to explore several “devices” used by Surrealists. Perhaps, the most important is “automatic writing” produced by the unconscious rather than the conscious. Breton admonished his associates to, “Just write!” Also…

GS: …Young practices “automatic writing!” Listen to this! “This piece is / a note on this piece. / She found it unicorned inside the / hiding-place of those animals / that did not make it onto the Ark.” or, “…every guitarist, / at some point, has / their sound modified / by a distortion gen- / erated by an area / of machine learning.”

P: Yes! You’ve got the idea! Another characteristic of the Surrealists is “juxtaposition”—the unexpected grouping of opposing or unrelated things creating the absurd. Young employed juxtaposition frequently in “…effrontés.” Surrealists, also…

GS: …Young relies on juxtaposition quite a bit in “…abyss.” For example, “’real maple syrup / shows promise in protecting brain / health,’ when combined with the / original concepts of kindergartens, / reflect a truth in human development.” or, “In no particular / order, raindrops keep / falling from the ceil- / ing, a candle halos / but provides no light.” The poet, also, includes several vispo poems in “…abyss,” juxtaposing words and images.

P: Good! Depending upon how heavily you want to rely on critics, Marjorie Perloff has much to say about “collage poetry” and juxtaposition. I am very fond of her comment, “Each element in the collage has a kind of double function: it refers to an external reality even as its compositional thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it seems to assert.” Here, Perloff seems in sync with the Surrealists, suggesting an inherent contradiction in the practice of certain avant garde compositions. You will, also, want to keep in mind that the Surrealists saw their project as a transformational one, not only to change what we think of as Art, but, also, to change society. Thus, the group around Breton created a revolutionary, collective imagination that he termed, “exquisite corpse.”

GS: In “…abyss,” Young does not speak of a revolutionary community per se, though some of his poems are political and bring to mind psychosocial transformations, especially, as they may relate to the ideas of Sigmund Freud. One of Magritte’s paintings is titled, “The Pleasure Principle,” after Freud’s famous text, and the apple is symbolic throughout Magritte’s work, as well as, Young’s poems.

P: Ummm, Young employed repetition in “…effrontés,” also, though the Surrealists did not emphasize this device. You will want to identify Young’s own “voice” as it is similar to but, also, different from, the ideas set forth in Breton’s 1924 manifesto. We will have an opportunity to discuss your project as it unfolds. Your research will reveal other characteristics of Surrealist works, such, as the tendency to draw upon other cultures, the use of uncanny images, and “doubling” whereby an artist’s rendering is not the “thing itself.” The most important concept to keep in mind as you proceed is that the Surrealists were reimagining Art, artists, and society as a whole. You might want to begin writing with the question: What is the relationship between individual and social liberation and freedom? And, of course, you will consider all of Surrealism’s features as they relate directly to “…abyss” and to Young’s style.

GS: Thank you; this has been a productive session for me; I am relieved and can’t wait to get started! See you at our next meeting!

..

Clara B. Jones, a woman of color, is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other writings, she is author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal (Gauss PDF, 2019).

 

pink maggit by M; Margo; Review by Clara B. Jones

pink maggit
M; Margo [Margo Emm: photograph]
2019
Ghost City Press Summer Series
Unpaginated [12 pp]
Free PDF @ ghostcitypress.com [donations accepted]

Short Review by Clara B. Jones

 

“I tell them that the tricks of today are the truths of tomorrow.” Marcel Duchamp

I am an autodidact when it pertains to learning about the arts, criticism, and literary theory. In order to “get” what experimental poetry is about, i have had to read widely in the fields of experimental & innovative literature, Modernism, as well as, Post-modernism. M; Margo [Margo Emm] is an experimental poet, musician, Facebook personality, and editor whose career I have followed for several years. Having reviewed their books, it seems clear that each volume serves both psychological and literary purposes. Many of their poems address Margo’s ongoing experiences with “gender dysphoria,” and I have categorized them as a writer of “angst,” as a master of dark, not always humorous, wit. Whether you have read their work or are new to it, you will discover that their compositions rarely devolve to the levels of self-pity, nihilism, or narcissism. On the contrary, Margo’s semi-confessional pieces depict an artist in the process of confronting life bravely and realistically—in all of its dimensions and complexity. Indeed, their texts blur the distinctions between life and art.

Exploring the realms of the personal and interior, however, is not the only, or, perhaps, the primary, reason to read Margo’s body of work which displays the poet’s significant facility with combinatorial “language games” [Wittgenstein] and word play. Margo is a master of the coded “collage” poem. One can spend hours attempting to decode their texts, demonstrating that even experimental poetry can satisfy at least some Formalist criteria, in this case, “interpretive power” [Helen Vendler]. The hidden messages are not only intellectually and psychologically stimulating but, also, serve to establish a relationship with each reader. These poems also meet a high standard of “imagery,” each a visual as well as a verbal composition.

Such challenges begin with the name of the new chapbook—pink maggit, title of a song by the metal band, Deftones, whose music is classified as “nu metal” or “rap rock.” Based upon an internet source, “the  song is meant to be triumphant,” describing a bullied “kid” implored to “become the leader of [their] surroundings.” “If you are confident you can do whatever you want.” Based upon my reading of Margo’s body of work, I would speculate that they identify with the subject of the song, and their Facebook feed provides a record of their journey toward holistic health. “Change (in the house of flies),” poem three of this new eight-poem collection, is, also, the title of a Deftones song that, according to a description on the internet, is “metaphorical,” “spawned” from a young man “being a complete asshole and getting the complete repercussion for it by having [his] life taken away.” This composition entails a conventional innovative poem superimposed upon a greytone pastiche of words. The poem begins, “staring @twitter when / a canadian soldier flies / towards my laptop screen, ….” Whether or not this song applies literally to Margo, it may express certain anxieties about their vulnerability openly shared on Facebook and in their written work.

The pieces in pink maggit are “collage” poems, a technique that can be traced back to the Italian Futurist poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti [1909: “words in freedom”] and to the Dadaist poet, Tristan Tzara [1920: “cut-up poetry”]. In the poetry critic, Marjorie Perloff’s, words, “Each element in the collage has a kind of double function: it refers to an external reality even as its compositional thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it seems to assert.” Thus, collage compositions are crafted by juxtapositions of relations between elements, and Margo employs this device throughout the new pamphlet, assembling words and phrases in a variety of conformations or superimposing typical innovative poems upon a pastiche of terms—generally, the same term repeated over and over within each poem, sometimes arranged symbolically, such as composition four, “Minerva,” displaying four circles surrounding an erased square, elements of the circles spelling out, “I am not a woman.”

While some of Margo’s collections appear rigorously rule-governed [see, for example, his 2019 full-length book, road road road road road, ma press, Finland], the poems in pink maggit seem less controlled, though they  remain intentionally crafted. While, unlike the Dadaists, Margo’s new chapbook is not overtly anti-establishment or “anti-art,” this work disrupts, and, sometimes, ridicules, the criteria, form, and content associated with mainstream literature, in particular, via their poems’ distrust of unity and coherence—no center or narrative, each element standing on its own with repetition emphasizing the importance and significance of each poem’s elements. I encourage potential readers of pink maggit, and other collections by Margo, to view their work within a tradition of American avant garde poets who precede them [e.g., T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Susan Howe, Ted Berrigan]. Margo deserves a wide audience and, in my opinion, is among the best experimental poets of their generation.

..

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal [GaussPDF, 2019]. Clara, also, conducts research on experimental literature, radical publishing, as well as, art and technology.

Seven poems by Peter J. King

 

 

Dr Peter J. King, Lecturer in Philosophy, Pembroke College, Oxford OX1 1DW
Academia.edu page |  Poetry page

Adding Colours to the Chameleon: poetry & prose spanning forty years
All What Larkin: cut-up poems from Philip Larkin’s jazz criticism