POBLOG

I had to review a poetics blog this week. It didn't go well. Essentially, if this is a poetics blog, it sucks ass. I don't think I have the time to really put together a good poetics blog. That makes me sad. Here is the blog I reviewed:

poetsvegananarchistpacifist.blogspot.com

It's not really a poetics blog, but that's because th e others that I randomly clicked on from a link were disjointed, uninteresting, inconsistent and ultimately self-serving.

Whoops.

If I really want this to be anything more than my personal bitch sheet, I have to make a considerate effort. I don't think I can do that right now, or do I actually know how. So... I think this will remain a roll of toilet paper for now. No one is making you read this.

If you are a poet, I would encourage you to submit your work to the Columbia Poetry Review. It's a very good, student edited publication and I believe that if I know you and you are a poet, I like you and your work. For the most part. I can only think of a couple of people I would like to personally solicit (and I think I will do just that), but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like anything you, Reader, might send in. It's a huge board with a lot of differing opinions and you never really know what's going to get in. And you're a kick ass poet anyway, so do it. I promise I'll speak up loud and clear when we check out your work.

http://english.colum.edu/cpr/submissions.htm

Please. I'd really like to see a name I know pop up.

Other than that, I had a minor set back the other week, but my other poems have gone over pretty well. I'm getting more and more motivated. Hopefully I can produce something worth something. How capitalist is that?

big trouble in little me

a poem that needs work is simply a poem that needs work. different perspectives, different motivators, different tenses, whatever it needs can usually be identified and utilized, especially within a workshop perspective. common protocol is to preface your critique with something positive in order to basically encourage encouragement and lay your beef out as articulately and objectively as possible.

that's a poem that needs work. a shitty poem is a poem that is finished. it can't be helped. a bad poem is done before you even start and the finished product is what slid out your ass. you can't take a pile of shit and make it beautiful. you recreate the god damned venus demilo or david, but guess what creep, it's still a pile of your own shit. now instead of just dumping it in the toilet and flushing it away, you've been playing with it for an afternoon and need 18 showers and have ruined a pair of jeans. also, you're that guy everyone knows to play with his own poop.

i wrote a shitty poem for class today. worst part is, i liked it. i was happy with it. i was excited to share it and hear what others thought. i was glad that this was the first poem i was bringing to this association of colleagues that i have been thrown into. now, i'm disgustingly embarrassed and ashamed and questioning why the fuck i'm here. is it because some undergrad press published a chapbook? is it because of my letters of recommendation? is it because i sent a fruit basket into the grad office to thank them for their help?

i'm terrified now. i'm embarrassed. i'm completely paranoid that everyone who i thought was my new friend now thinks i'm a fucking joke. i want to quit.

i'm also a giant fucking baby. it's the allen way. you'd think i'd grasp that idea by now. with 25 years of destroying myself over and over and over again in any venue of skill and then rebuilding and reconstructing to at least a relative mastery, you'd think i'd be able to restrain these feelings of inadequacy and shame when failing so miserably. but i guess that's all a part of it; where the motivation to bring myself above is born from. vengeance, basically. revenge against myself for this injustice i have brought on the nation of jeff. if i quit, the terrorist jeff allen, wins. i really am my own shit-fiddlin' worst enemy.

i miss some people. there was always this awkward and eager respect within my past poetry communities. i haven't been involved in a circle of writers in a long time. i know that i've effectively destroyed every bridge to everyone who's ever known anything about me as a writer in the past, and i can accept that, and maybe i don't even deserve the right to even say that i miss them, but i do. i know every one of us is a completely different person now and whatever we used to have is very incontrovertibly past tense, but i think that makes my missing that much more... poignant? effective? useful?

probably just pathetic.

i don't know. it's the only thing i really miss about the educational institution of millikin. and maybe that's how i need to look at it so i don't take this hulking failure and turn it into sobbing. jesus christ i'm terrified.

Slamdunk

by Yusef Komunyaka

Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury's
Insignia on our sneakers,
We outmaneuvered the footwork
Of bad angels. Nothing but a hot
Swish of strings like silk
Ten feet out. In the roundhouse
Labyrinth our bodies
Created, we could almost
Last forever, poised in midair
Like storybook sea monsters.
A high note hung there
A long second. Off
The rim. We'd corkscrew
Up & dunk balls that exploded
The skullcap of hope & good
Intention. Bug-eyed, lanky,
All hands & feet . . . sprung rhythm.
We were metaphysical when girls
Cheered on the sidelines.
Tangled up in a falling,
Muscles were a bright motor
Double-flashing to the metal hoop
Nailed to our oak.
When Sonny Boy's mama died
He played nonstop all day, so hard
Our backboard splintered.
Glistening with sweat, we jibed
& rolled the ball off our
Fingertips. Trouble
Was there slapping a blackjack
Against an open palm.
Dribble, drive to the inside, feint,
& glide like a sparrow hawk.
Lay ups. Fast breaks.
We had moves we didn't know
We had. Our bodies spun
On swivels of bone & faith,
Through a lyric slipknot
Of joy, & we knew we were
Beautiful & dangerous.




I wish I could write a poem like that about sports. God damn.

Thanks to my brother for finding this website... it's pretty damned intriguing.

I guess August sucked?

That's a lie. August was wonderful. So wonderful, that I forgot this thing existed. I don't want to bore you with the personal aspirations and successes or failures that the waning summer sent my way, just rest assured, faithful reader, little was done that afforded me the courtesy of a blog update. Funny how now as I sit in the wake of three of my four graduate classes and am completely winded by the extent of the work expected of me, I find the time to write down some rather meaningless dribble for the internet communities that might come across this. The seven or eight people who live at the center of the earth with their planet-core powered laptops just clicking away to the ends of the internet, they are my biggest fans.

So, Morlocks, what the fuck is up? I started school. It's more than I could have imagined. Last night we had our first workshop, just an introductory thing of course, no one had any work to shop, but still I was sitting there grinning my stupid face off all evening. We are a class of nine and we are awesome. I can't wait to read what these people write. Of us, there is another marathoner, an ex-Decaturian, a Pittsburgh native who says "Stillers" instead of "Steelers", and a baby Chicagoan fresh out of southern Cali who already claims this city as her home without experiencing a winter. Maybe presumptuous, but definitely admirable.

This week has been eye-opening. I don't want to discredit any friendships or conversations that I've ever had, but the things that I've said this week in discussion are things I have barely even thought about in years. It was so god damned refreshing to talk about poetry and education theory with other people who honestly just have the patience for that shit. I love Daniel and Robert, don't get me wrong, but they have barely read any of my poetry, much less engaged me in conversation about it. After workshop last night where we discussed an article on difficulty in poetry by Reginald Shepherd and a defense of MFA poetry programs by one of Columbia's faculty, my roommates and I dissected the word 'successfully' and turned it into 'suck-sex-fucking' in reference to how Daniel's recording session with one of our female friends went.

Who the fuck am I, really?

I feel like I'm betraying someone or something. Maybe it's really poetic and I'm just fooling myself. In reality I'm probably some Vegas diva hopped up on goofballs giving footjobs for stem cells in the back alley of an abortion clinic. Whatever. People have balanced more contradicting lifestyles before. My last relationship existed between two people who didn't even really exist and knew it. Everyone fools themselves constantly.

On that same note, in all these classes you go around and do your introductions and for some reason, I can never actually say anything interesting about myself. It's always after I mutter something about movies and video games that I realize I actually have some unique and intriguing things to say. All my classmates probably think I'm some turdy shade of gray at this point. I just don't get where my head goes when put on the spot like that. I can't say I'm a runner or a vegan or a musician or even a writer, and here I am stuck dead in an MFA program. Anyway, I just feel like a douche. I'm sure everyone will get to know me to a frustrating extent and all of this first-week goosebump bullshit will be far behind us.

I should hopefully be writing more. At least getting the shit I've been shitting shit on by other shits in an effort to make cleaner shit. Here's my prompt for this week:

"For next week, write a poem in which all events occur simultaneously. ("Events" may be internal as well as external; may be antidramatic as well as dramatic; may be thoughts instead of actions; and so on.)

The poem should include your 10 favorite words from Tender Buttons. Write these words at the top of the page so that we can re-experience them in your poem."

So many semi-colons.

where smokes, there fires

if at the time I had known that I were
standing in the smoke of the last burning square of my life,
enveloped like a letter addressed to an author-unwary
number on a gutted street, my skin inked but enclosed in
the thinnest tomb by the gravedigger and his hopes of undeath,
I might have found cause for greater ceremony, a road sign for my
jigsaw memory as if this one of thousands were worth more alone
than any other evening shivering on a broken-code porch,
watching the Star sail across a city-swamped sky.

trumpets were not even muted as no labored air moved
through rusted pipes that night; that was saved for an
abandoned morning as streets passed beneath soles with
a cry for (un)black-market organs or a worthwhile cough
-in for the stained rejection. it was there I met penultimate finality,
saving those shaped figures for the eves of rest.

to put a stop, a full severing of the intake on this
carcinogen of conscience, that would
take something/where/one more than a hack and slash
morning stomp along the city streets so choked with
my lung bane’s cousin. that would take me on capital-bound
roads, measuring those lines with time and citations but the worth
is a simple fact as knowing all smoke is carried away in the wind.

funny how basking in the glow of a fumeless fire I
still see that flaming geometry as something always
to fall back into. after a Greek’s misplaced memorial and a war
with neighborhood bears (maybe an extended absence
from a central-state heart) after rounds of duetted “Niki!” echoing
off ancient cave walls; the more victorious voices that make
this chorus will cut the
aural force smaller and thinner, a shade of song slipping into
the nothingness of a hibernation,
of a home. a celebration had, but a prize forgotten, and yet
that ember still glows so bright when surrounded by the dark of
those deep belly caverns.

I was always good at this math, the measuring of shapes
only just seen and yet unassumed; assigning numerical order to an otherwise
unrealized length of side or of time or of anything with the dimension
and sentience to stretch itself away from me. I was always good at figuring
just how far away I could get.

but that being the physical, the solid, measurement is an actual
visibility and a universal figure, there are other dimensions
of length or of side or of time without such civility.
it is that not found in any classroom or chalkboard,
but in the weight of the ink on the page that I
find myself most curious to measure. height and width
come along with written language as essential
factors, yet the third
and undeniable dimension of scripted message and meaning is
one without number, label or symbol and begs to question: How
can a pulse onto paper be anything but reflected when the third
dimension is anything but deep?

the course taken when weighing the smoke of inked incineration
is too common and too folly a path for us distance runners. measuring
is the everyday of our bodies and the mind is hardly nature’s perpetual motion
machine, there is nothing left for the conceptual starter. one must
be diligent to the distance of body from body, from home,
and cannot stray into how deep the visualized folds of a tarless
brain now scar.

it’s this assiduousness that drives writer from writing, runner from running,
body from body. it’s the loyalty to the blind obedience that
makes dogs of us all, mouths slack and tongues loose, wagging we wag. a heaving
chest carries the weight of shaped math and the curves of a
sputtering starter heart, beats like footheels on asphalt all cracks and steam,
the breadth of a city as the breath of a man.

black-eyed (edited)

your new name hangs off the end
of your pressurized coal like a dragging pipe,
spewing smoke and sparks and shapeless noise like the ambience
in the street, and you
could start a parade if you only drove a little slower.

your new last name sounds like a freshly
dried candle, hanging from a rail still tied to
its twin, rolling in the sun like dogs in the dirt.
the waiting wicks tremble in the breeze safely, like
this soft air won’t ever feed immolation, but if fate
is anything to a finite burn, it’s never right where you are.

these witch wicks might have cast love spells
into the past on two blacking pairs of eyes that could
have fallen into any bed, staring through any hazy window.
maybe the heat of that summer night mixed with
the booze in your blood made you unaware of the dancing
candles and their incessant chanting, just
the murky molecules bouncing from one another droning the drums
in your ears. you wanted no code-break, no task of celestial cipher,
all you needed was to lose yet another piece
of your ringed self.

when black eyes burn white and the afternoon pants
like an alarm, sweaty feet hit a floor only cold because it’s hard.
a body only warm because it’s soft depresses the bed and
you figure this is what they all deserve as you turn a naked back
to lidded eyes. you know they just can’t
be the black you recall so you question the clothes at the foot of the bed.

his whole life in your hands now, you mouth the words
of candlemakers and playground taunts. blue eyes roll around
a skull like there’s room for two, but the ruse fades fast and you
hustle the hustle out.

he could fly jets with that stick between his legs and he will call
your signs and raise your directions. there always has to be a haze before
anything becomes clear, otherwise we’d all know the answers
and no one would need to discuss it with empty clothes, the mockery
of human form. and just like last night,
to get out, you have to be in.

your new last name is no weekend tent or thunderstorm umbrella,
it’s surgical and unconscious, taking the pros years to install
it into your life, replacements. it’s an even bigger plain over a cresting hill, full of
more wax and cotton than you knew was needed for such and ancient art. papa
will pay for the art of braids, they lay
one over the other and these humid strands are finally given shape and function,
to hold another as it
holds back, as clear as the clear as the cleanse, and without which not.