in a little bit, i will be sending my submission for the next kearny street workshop chapbook. this will mark a bit of a change in that i will be mixing it up with overheard conversations, transcripted (at least in my head) monologues, a fiction excerpt and a flarf poem. yeah, quite the mixed bag o’stuff but the eclectic nature of my writing speaks very much to the fact that literature keeps leaving me with more questions than answers.
the good thing is that the answers i am getting are feeling more and more genuine. take for example the fact that while i am going with a flurry of styles, the theme for the work remains consistent: cartography, the are of map making. with that start, i have a whole new appreciation for the science behind this skill which takes the invisible and makes it visible (thank you for that phrase, señor espada).
the biggest imprint this is leaving on me is this open-ended question that i will pose to whoever is reading this:
Do you want your poems to look like this:
Or, do you want them to look like this:
both will get you from point a to point b but one does it with an eye towards aesthetics and one with a desire to be realistic. is one more confusing then the another? maybe. are they both “true”? yeah. but i will leave it up to y’all which is for you.
love ya like a rushed commuter loves an empty seat!
Points Not Found On Any Map—
Except the one that exists in my mindan atlas of nationalism
[Poem was here. Now found at Points Not Found]
ooh yay flarf-y cut-up poem! i am assuming this is a prose poem (kind of can’t tell if those are line breaks or …) at any rate, i think it totally works as a prose poem. this is a dense motherf***er. i like that you have axed so many ‘connector’ words, which of crse makes this so dense.
you’ve also erased the speaker and i think this makes what the poem is saying even more offensive.
(the alternative comment was going to read: “lookit you all disrupted syntax n sh*t. what, are you married to an experimental poet or something?”)