KNaR e GaViN

Poet | Cyclist | Student | Fiend

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Zurita on those ‘dead in ourselves’

Poetry is the great exception. Valerie Mejer Caso’s poems speak to this exception. By symbolically gathering the remains of her dead brother, Edinburgh Notebook asks us to confront the dead brother in ourselves, just as it begins to form the words of a possible rebirth. Dead in ourselves, suicides in ourselves, we see that great poetry is always an act of restitution by which we recover the parts of ourselves that we have killed. Children of a blood-thirsty God, whose laziness and boredom have been called history, society, and culture—whatever living parts of us remain run through the lines of this book, in its arresting tenderness, its love, the sweetness of its invocation, in the desert my love, because it strives to use those parts to rebuild something immense and inexplicable that was once and is no longer.

From Raul Zurita’s introduction to Valerie Mejer Caso’s Edinburgh Notebook, trans. Michelle Gil-Montero (Action Books, 2020)

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“Bushes and Light”

Why not talk, ceaselessly, about only the landscape. About our bad habits, of sowing and sleeping, of rising early, of dying before our time? We are this map calibrated to our bad fate. So we can’t just say: Ah light, ah fog, ah grass. Instead we’ll say that everyone says goodbye however they can, blood and the absurd knot together the last words I said to them and what I now say.

From Valerie Mejer Caso’s Edinburgh Notebook, trans. Michelle Gil-Montero (Action Books, 2020)

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Head to Annulet and check out my recent essay on environmental justice, climate action, and the work of solidarity. 

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“Do You Remember?”

Do you remember the day we first met when so much water fell for so long, like joy and sorrow? Since you didn’t call me, I couldn’t fall asleep. Since you didn’t call me ever again, I tossed and turned all my life. From Choi Seungija’s Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me, trans. Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong (Action Books, 2020)

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O, the vilest are destined for rewards      and the best stand gaping mouths wide before an empty simalcrum, The narrative alone makes me gloomy, and the rich conduct their business on their heads.

Marcabru via Bruce Andrews in “Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis”

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And somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid.

David Berman, Actual Air (Drag City, 1999/2020)

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From Kaia Sand’s interval

From “Appellation”

I can make a house like a poem words are nothing but poems but I can’t pay rent with a name sometimes words all together are rhetoric and sometimes that pays the rent but I’m tired of anomalies what are role models but anomalies

From “Aquifer”

ashamed of this but my uncle logged and loved the owls and another knew the fish levels in the river . . .

I am not ready to abandon what I have not learned

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Natalie Diaz on getting had (++)

From "The Cure for Melancholy Is to Take the Horn"

. . . Brodsky said, Darkness restores what light cannot      repair. You thrilled me—torn to the comb I want everything—the ebon bull and the moon.      I come again for the honeyed horn . . .

Our bodies are nothing if not places to be had by      as in, God, she had me by the throat, by the hip bone, by the moon. God,      she hurt me with my own horns.

From “Snake-Light”

I can read a text in anything.

To read a body is to break that body a little.

From Natalie Diaz's Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020)

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From "As a Blow, From the West"

.. isn’t it only in the bracing and first wake of

loss that we guess most cleanly the speed with which what held us left us?

Carl Phillips, Rock Harbor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)

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"When I was saying, ' White people, to to hell,' I never had trouble finding a publisher. But when I was saying, 'Black and white, unite and fight, destroy capitalism,' then you suddenly get to be unreasonable."

Amiri Baraka, Home: Social Essays (William Morrow, 1966)

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There are so many ways in which there is no crime

     Do you see, nothing is surprising but a coincidence. A fact is not surprising, a coincidence is surprising and that is the reason that crime is surprising. There is always a coincidence in a crime.

     There are so many ways in which there is no crime.

From Gertrude Stein’s Blood On the Dining Room Floor (Banyan Press, 1948)

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From Raquel Salas Rivera’s THE TERTIARY

From “The Debt Circulation Process” in the closet there is still carpeta. mami asks me if i have a girl or a friend. it is still a suspicious  act to be in love or write poems.

From “Notes on a Derailed Circulation”

my students show up, with their food, to lie down. they say divine things about the sky, the night, and the city. i’m supposed to explain how they killed the mermaids with an educational calm and speak to them of dreams, the origins of fear, and history.

Raquel Salas Rivera, The Tertiary (Noemi Press, 2019)

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“‘There once was/a bird. Good lord.’”

Helena Boberg, Sense Violence, trans. Johannes Göransson (Black Ocean, 2013/2020)

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From Kim Kyung Ju’s Whale and Vapor

In “Midnight Highlighter”

Best regards! Breastbone! Best regards! Come back pitch-black! My poetry rents me the inside of bubbles.

In “A Life Rummaging through Books”

Like a kid lightly placing a pencil inside a spoon holder

it ends.

Kim Kyung Ju, Whale and Vapor (Black Ocean 2020), trans. Jake Levine

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Your town has its own histories, its own fraudulent spaces. Your town manufactures marginalization too.

Berry Grass, Hall of Waters (The Operating System, 2019)

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“Those of us whose imaginations had been reached would not sell out: we would not stop at the images, or at 'sincerity,' at security, or any one field. There are relationships, we said, to be explored; and in our weakness and limitation, in ignorance and several poverties and doubt and disgust, we thought of possibility."

Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Wesleyan UP, 1949/1996)

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Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey on the steam engine—both technology + allegory

I would argue that the steam engine is less of a data point than a geologic for transatlantic modernity .. Therefore, the steam engine is not just a technology; its appearance in this Anthropocene origin story is an allegory for Enlightenment tropes such as rationality, secularism, urbanization, individualism, property, freedom, rights, masculinity, and wage labor.

From Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke UP, 2019)