Second Person March 28, 2012: for You IF YOU WON’T LET US DREAM WE WON’T LET YOU SLEEP is what signs in Tahrir Square said in the days of the Arab Spring. In this case, we know who the YOU is. As Jane Sprague says, in her review [in XCP 12] of Ammiel Alcalay’s book, from the warring factions [Beyond Baroque 2002], we have “ideas of placing, of fixing – in [...] by Norma Cole

Translations of Awareness March 21, 2012: The eleventh hour fleeting as if it’s your hand I’m holding for Stacy Doris I look up from reading. Sun. A bird lands on the roof of the building opposite. Side-tracks, deviations—the dérive? [meaning “drift,” the topos, the “urban drift” of the Situationists, cf The Beach Beneath The Street, McKenzie Wark, Verso [...] by Norma Cole

Daive, donkey, monkeying around March 14, 2012: My translation of Jean Daive’s A Woman With Several Lives (Une Femme de quelques vies, Flammarion 2009) has just come out from La Presse. Recently, an old friend and an editor in Canada asked who Jean Daive is, and why I translate poetry. “I mean,” she said, “you can’t work on your own poems if you’re working on someone else.” [...] by Norma Cole

This and That March 6, 2012: Why are we looking at this—what does this have to do with poetry (writing poetry) now? Said in class with some exasperation by a student. The this doesn’t matter. Its matter could be anything. It’s the exasperation that makes it/this crucial. The exasperation inspires this writing. Feeling it, taking it in, from her into me, mine own [...] by Norma Cole

Peter’s Poem December 31, 2011: I suppose I could quote from Peter’s poem that begins: Between autumn and spring I sleep inside a column streaming semen from the sky a time for mapping and counting is done and it feels really good just letting the waves make their own history and I already I feel good, satisfied. The year is ending. And Peter’s sonnet-ish [...] by Eileen Myles

Mary Jo’s Poem (or else Dante’s) December 28, 2011: Look! It’s the beast with the pointed tail, Who leaps tall mountains and shatters barriers— Stone wall or high-tech weapon. Look! It’s him Who stinks up the world. If you are ever knocking around New York on Maundy Thursday which I can tell you this coming year is on April 5th you should go up to John the Divine on the upper west [...] by Eileen Myles

ALBERT’S POEM December 13, 2011: Albert’s poem starts off elegantly: The whole of it is winged,  . . . and honestly if the poem continued on as elegantly I would likely put it down. But instead it dips away: …this science of speaking about large things in pocket size you do it by letting likeness creep in, makes me resemble you the  [...] by Eileen Myles

DANIEL’S POEM December 1, 2011: It keeps changing shapes and sometimes it looks like prose. It’s in a collection of poems that all call themselves something with the word “Book” in the title. Like this one, “The Book of Broken Bodies.” It goes: The Book of Broken Bodies is itself a broken book. The cover is torn; the pages are ripped out; and the ink has smeared [...] by Eileen Myles

NAOMI’S POEM November 30, 2011: I hate to use the poem on the back of the book but that’s the one I wanted. I was at the San Francisco Zen Center last week and Paul Haller, the abbot, a man who I have heard speak many times and I have often thought if I had a teacher it would be him - for instance in the course of a Zen talk Paul once said, “pattern is contact” which I [...] by Eileen Myles

HERMAN’S POEM November 16, 2011: I think someone literally shoved a pile of books in my hand this fall. I think I was stooped and looking at his stuff – Here, take em, he growled like I might be a little too shy to accept this gift. Most of them I owned and I deposited the books on one of those ledges that surround little peed-on trees in the east village. But I kept the [...] by Eileen Myles