Quick Learn
At dinner last night with a brilliant poet, we shuffled through the encyclopedia of poets between us. I noted the brilliance of Anne Boyer; she noted the recent “Good Apocalypse”; I revisited today. Yes, for you, two below from Anne Boyer’s “Good Apocalypse” and vital parting advice: if you don’t know, you don’t know. So go. Yo.
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I LOVE LITERATURE
I was attacking Culture.
I have seen her and she is so big and so beautiful.
Pulling a thirty-six-inch strip out of Language
and eating it,
she has given me an opportunity
to pattern gothic specialties, small farmers, and starfish
out of the reddish-brown essence that implies a native land.
Outlines of legacy are a minimal-production glass creature.
I worry it’s too much like voice and structure.
What’s better is when we can eat our fermented hurt
and someone gives a seminar on Kathy Acker’s
regional, agricultural, and mining sectors.
I am not free to be mad.
When I smell Archer Daniels Midland
it is as if an oligarchy has dived into the wreck.
Yes, I love Literature
but what I love about it is
the reproductive organs of Capital.
~~
TRAVAIL MECHANIQUE
Bunnies occupy the same
semantic field as question-begging.
KEEP MOUTH SHUT.
Ours is no vigorous religion–
packages from Acme piled up under the stairs.
The problem of distribution:
How do you want to die?
Not in the course of self-examination,
but in the loop
of the public discourse:
shaking the razor,
shaking the shipping container:
serving the cause
of the common error.
~~
9 Responses to “Quick Learn”
AMY KING View All →
Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She co-edited with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She also co-edits the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry, and is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
AMY KING 
June 5th, 2007 at 2:11 pm eThanks for posting Boyers’ poems, Amy. Great works.If you want to shift lines to the right – use as many of the following code as you need:
June 5th, 2007 at 2:38 pm eWere you dining alone again?
June 5th, 2007 at 3:05 pm eOnce when I was dining with myself, I called her “she” and “she” consumed me. I’m whole again.Nope, Dan — a West Coaster.
Sam,
Thanks, I’m going to try to use your code, and I will call it SRML.
June 5th, 2007 at 3:10 pm eInteresting edge.“I am not free to be mad.”
June 5th, 2007 at 3:12 pm eHey, most of my comments didn’t make it through
June 5th, 2007 at 3:13 pm eJim, I see two – sorry if more didn’t make it! I don’t know what’s happening — maybe you posted them while I was editing the post and that affected your attempts?Sam, the SRML worked! Thanks~
June 5th, 2007 at 5:00 pm eIt was the tail of the second comment that got lopped off.
I cut/pasted a quote
(about the reproductive organs of capital).
Some characters may have whacked my antiquated workplace browser.
Anyway, I thought the last strophe of I Love Literature
could be read at least 4 different ways…and they were all cool.
June 9th, 2007 at 9:19 pm eAB’s Good Apocalypse is one of my favourite books. she’s great, I agree-
bests,
Marco
June 11th, 2007 at 1:54 am eWow, great stuff–such surprising use of language.