The language is pyrotechnic, mind-expanding. With 64 poems it might be the new I-Ching, treating the dictionary like a bundle of yarrow stalks—pull carefully, you have nothing to lose but your illusion of limits.
Actually, the review praised a Sardine favorite. But it got the movie all wrong. The reviewer talked about the director, writers, and actors as celebrities and potential award winners. Little was said about the meaning or nature of the movie.
The third act begins with what’ll become Paul’s redeeming moment: entering the same classroom where he was first indoctrinated, lulled into romanticizing war and being an altruistic soldier. Paul decides to confront the teacher and new recruits and speak the truth.
My greatest legacy, the Sistine Chapel, would not have built without creative financing – nor would my nephew’s hiring of Michelangelo to paint the ceiling been possible – and given the tourists something to marvel over.
The deception of labels can be used self-consciously, provocatively. When you hold one mirror against another there can be many different results, from infinite repetition to out of focus darkness.
Discursiveness, particularly in its poetic form rather than its philosophical scope, serves as a mimesis of the thought processes, inherently descriptive in nature. It is often perceived as a way to mirror the way thoughts flow and evolve, rather than presenting a strictly linear or coherent argument.
When reading a poem, or a book of poems, based on other material, does the reader need to be familiar with that material? Is this why ekphrastic poems are often published with a picture of the work of art that inspired the poem?
Good art, for me, is that which is focused on form, on aesthetic, on guaranteeing that those who partake within the art are being told not what to see, but how to see. A good story means little to me if its prose doesn’t meet the criterion of its plot, or if the camera merely follows the characters it films.
During his period as a senior member of the Franciscan Order there is clear evidence that Francesco della Rovere fathered several illegitimate children through a number of affairs, including a son, Giuliano della Rovere (later Pope Julius II) born out of incest with his sister Raffaele della Rovere (1423-1477)...
The Internet is passé. It’s the day before the day before yesterday when it comes to communicating with the public. You have to think smaller and more quickly. 140 characters at a time.
Clearly the course of love did not run smoothly, both in the 1300s and today. And where that love is between two men, the ability to find comfort and support can be all the more difficult.
This was a celebratory time for American culture, unless you happened to be Black. As viewers saw in Ken Burn’s documentary Jazz, musician Dave Brubeck recalls the return of his military outfit, his band, to their home base in Texas.
The stranger finishes his Campari. “I should’ve expected this. Two cable series, at the same time, on that louse, Alexander VI.” He pauses. “I pre-dated that Borgia prick by thirty years. My family, the Riarios, put the kabash on Roderigo and Cesare.”
The poems in Other Sacred give us many colorful pieces with a wide range of observations and wonderings. There’s a whole section on jazz and its makers. And throughout the book are the shadows and results of man’s interactions with nature.
Along with being very funny, Cheches is very inventive and also writes with great economy. He has the skill of a magician, surprising and amusing the reader with his verbal sleight-of-hand and crisp wit.
The world is a conglomeration of over two hundred nations, many of which are barely functional, and even the most established nations have many, many problems.
The poet’s identity is perceived by the writing itself, and to read a poem is to sometimes see from those others eyes. When the writing is self-portraiture, we see what we might not otherwise, we see the internal perception of a person with a clarity that can be very intimate.
Audrey Rose: Who’s this Sardine you’ve been writing about the last week?
Jackson Andrews: Joe already explained who he was.
Paul Peterson: I remember him mentioning it. The Sardine’s a moron.
Joe T.: Maybe you should unfollow me, Paul.
Generally, we’re all useless bystanders to the events happening around us or that we’re involved with. Anything significant goes on behind our backs. As if we’re programmed to ignore all the bad crap that happens in our lives.
But the full, necessarily subjective, effect of each piece—the elements and their arrangement—takes the work to another mind-space, a different perceptual dimension, at times ineffable but always communicating.
When the Sardine speaks outside this column, nothing he says can be taken at face value. Nothing he says he really means. Half the time he’s quoting from movies, and half the time he’s quoting movies completely out of context.
Apophallation Sketches: A Theater of Affective Extremes (j/j hastain, MadHat Press, 2016). [“Then suddenly one slug gnaws off its partner’s or its own penis, . . .That act is apophallation: take a gulp of ephemeral air, then chomp down, amputate your lover’s (or your own) dick.”]
What These Random Acts of Wildness does confirm is that the sonnet does not have to be the occasional toy of a writer out for a stretch, nor does a work of traditional poetry need to be only from a house thus dedicated.
“Instead of writing new Sardine articles, you should re-make the original book,” Joe T. interrupts my thoughts.
Once aware that I knew what was happening he schemed and forced my Khmer friend to lie and have me arrested for blackmail and sex trafficking. I was arrested for what he was doing. I learned that innocence doesn’t mean anything in some countries; Cambodia is one of them.
Really, who would publish, let alone read, this type of article in a newspaper? The column’s concept had developed in isolation from the public it had wished to attract. He was sorry for dreaming up the project.
Worse, the Today Show and Newsweek have contacted the Sardine for interviews, which the reticent fish wants to blow off. Also, the less the column has to say, the more intensely the nation’s readers have accepted it.
At first, he wanted to be part of the Sardine’s crew and be known by hundreds of thousands of people – and maybe more if the rumor about a television series had validity. This single-minded desire had kept him going through the barren days when he met hundreds of people who had never heard of the column...
About four years ago, I did five readings in Louisiana and Alabama with Wendy Taylor Carlisle and Jeff Weddle, arranged by publisher Jonathan Penton. Poems I can hear or read a few times and still enjoy and find nuance in are hard to come by, and Wendy and Jeff were bringing those in the tour.
I came across The Muslims’ Fuck These Fuckin’ Fascists, a 12-song, 22-minute blast of pure punk resistance. The Black and Brown, all-queer, Muslim three-piece pushes back against white supremacy, the rise of fascism, racial inequality, gender inequality, and islamophobia.
So, yes, Fuck Florida. But also see Florida for exactly what it is right now: an articulation of masculine dominance through any and all outlets provided by the dominant culture. Florida wants to be something it believes it is not: powerful. It especially wants to be seen that way.
I feel frightened, angry, and helpless. I don’t know what to do about the growing global spread of fascism, and I don’t know what to do about it here, in the United States.
We have the opportunity and indeed the responsibility to swing OUR DICKS AND DILDOS for the fences so that we can ensure Florida remains number one FOR ALL QUEERS, INCLUDING BIPOC AND TRANS FOLK.
I couldn’t tell my secrets to people in real life, but the characters in my books understood me. Now, kids in Florida don’t even have the full range of fictional characters to turn to for solace or kinship or just basic entertainment that isn’t stripped of everything potentially interesting.
All of these things are at issue in Florida and since Desantis declared his run for president and, honestly god-forbid, if he wins, America itself could become a place which no longer can legitimately call itself the land of the free, at least not in the eyes of the majority of people who live here.
Australia’s federal government would prefer that we forget this crime against humanity, this X in flesh in the air. Will you let them?
Then the shooting in Florida happened. The NRA wanted to bring guns to teachers. I couldn’t even get my students not to steal my candy or ink themselves with my stamps that were in my desk.
I’m IOWA pariah. I’m heterodox writer. I workshop Twitter, they says all. I brought shame. Esteemed institution happen. I’m IOWA pariah.
Mashinski’s book privileges me to enter another’s memory and dilemmas: her story in lyrical prose, a story in poems—written at times in the flattest voice of acknowledgment about how the earth and its devils will give you enough lives--enough to have one, after choosing to leave another.
Later that night, I was haunted by images of mortars and shell cartridges, but remember distinctly that even before the tree-planting school trip I used to think, “what if I wake up in the middle of the night to find myself in the fascist encampment?”
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