Pre-Owned Poems

My heart has been broken so many times I think it would hurt more if it was put back together.A good poet throws nothing out except the eggshells and coffee grounds; a great poet doesn't even throw those out.Sunk into a morass of my own unmaking.I don't think you ever start over, just again.Form is content by other means.“Where are the hiding places hiding?” (Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers)Redemption is recognition the present has passed: coming awake in its wake.The kind of poetry I want intensifies sense in its futile effort to negate social reality.Don't trust anyone over 30 or under 40.Topicality is the mirage of quicksand.Unless other voices wake us, we drown.I wouldn't join a group that agreed with what I said.The dead cannot return but we can tune into their echoes so that they can come to life in us. Poetry is not a second language. It's the first. All else follows. It's the way we travel across time or, better to say, travel in time, dwelling in the nick. (for Caroline Bervall's The Meddle)All schtick is local.“The idea of a popular art like a patriotic art if it has not been dangerous, to me seemed ridiculous. If it was made to render it accessible to the people, so sacrificing the refinements of the form, ‘good for idlers,’ I have frequented the gentry enough to know that they are the veritable illiterates, and not the electrical workers. To this point, a popular art form would have been destined above all for the members of the Jockey not for those of the General Confederation of Workers; on this subject, popular novels are as boring to common people as children's books are to those they are written for.” (Proust)When you address everyone, like they say, you address no one—but not even no one. But those no ones seem to know not.A melting pot is to multicultural homogeneity as a bricklayer is to cement.Holdtight, hold tight, hold tight, hold tightFoo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-k I (Leonard Ware / Sidney Bechet)years scribbling day and nightflash awards, public lightdoes not make a poet quiteGive a person the truth and they will put on a mask.Sponsored:Topsy-Turvy: Newly Unmastered: Socially sourced poems made from 100 percent recycled materials, matured in seasoned oak pitch, charred before filling to impart a piquant, indefinable nuttiness.line breaks arethought's inflectionI break for art, in the Biblical sense of the word.Write not what you know but what you can find out.Some see a glass half empty; others see it completely empty.Perception is 9/10ths of the (f)lawWhat a topsy-turvy worldWe tread on our headsWhile shepherds are bredTo be fleeced by the sheep!•Calves roast cooksPonies ride on phonies& the right to be taught freedom of thoughtIs toasted with Catholic negronies! (after Heine's “Verkehrte Welt”)A Jewish museum without Jewish artists (New York)A Jewish museum without Jews (Poland)Waiting for my stomach to get its sea legs.“Name's ache” (Maggie O'Sullivan)As my father liked to say, you can't serve soup with a slotted spoon. In other words, I don't want poems that can't hold their aesthetic water.an error of the earan ear for the era“Literature which contents itself with ‘describing things,’ to give a miserable resume of their lines and their surface, is, despite its realist pretension, the most distant from reality, that which impoverishes and saddens us the most, it speaks only of glory and grandeur, because it brusquely breaks from all communication from our self present with the past, in which things guard their essence, and the future, where they incite us to taste it again.” (Proust)“You are going to have a good time whether you like it or not.”You've receivedthis email because of yourinterest in PanaceaProductions. If you don'twish to get updates fromus, please reply to thisemail so we can addyour verified address toour Internet marketinglist.Not worth the vapor it's printed on.“There is the review intended to sell a book,—which comes out immediately after the appearance of the book, or sometimes before it; the review which gives reputation, but does not affect the sale, and which comes a little later; the review which snuffs a book out quietly; the review which is to raise or lower the author a single peg, or two pegs, as the case may be; the review which is suddenly to make an author, and the review which is to crush him. . . . Of all reviews the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable.” (Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now)There's not enough coffee in the coffee.Sponsored:Topsy-Turvy: “A more impudent attempt at humbugging the public with gimmicks and tricks has never been exercised.” (Immaculato Schwartz, Academy of American Poetry Writing Programs)Disfluency precedes fluency.The influence of anxiety.If a poet doesn't feel unjustly neglected or misunderstood by both mainstream and avant-garde, ideal readers and the elite, hoi polloi too, the poet is either not paying attention or doing something terribly wrong.You've got aggrievement? I've got aggrievement.“To serve man,” the aliens said on The Twilight Zone, referring to a cookbook. Fast forward: Republican Party USA.“You know who you are.” I remain confused on this point.In the absence of right or wrong, blame rules.Even a broken clock is right once in a blue moon.Chiliastic: a mellow form of sexual gratification involving cold compresses.Sometimes you need to take the horns of a dilemma without the bull.Let's not even get into the hormones of a dilemma.“Don't amortize my love.”The next morning I woke up groggy. It took me a few minutes to realize where I was and even then I couldn't be sure. There was an empty bottle of gin in the bed. I tried to shave but my right hand was shaky and the mirror looked cracked. I called downstairs for a pot of coffee, then started to write this entry, before it would turn into a blur. The phone rang. It was you.Are Jews a folly of God? Or God a folly of Jews? (after Nietzsche)“To a man not accustomed to thinking there is nothing in the world so difficult as to think.” (Trollope)Fairness without justice is tyranny.In other words, don't let generalizations become generals.The syncretic precedes the authentic, just as sublimity precedes beauty. (for Will Alexander)Musil's “Man without Qualities” (Eigenschaften): without convictions, principals, values, traits, determination, moral code, a minor person rather than a major man, a relativist. The man without character. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is an exemplary modernist novel of the postmodern condition.At the end of the day, you have to decide what kind of poet you are.a big heart and a small braina big brain and a small heartI've got affect you've got emotionI've got feeling you've got identityI've got voices you've got voiceIf reality was this kind of refuse of experience, nearly identical for everyone, because, when we say: bad weather, war, carriage stand, brightly lit restaurant, flower garden, all the world knows what we mean to say; if reality were that, without doubt a sort of cinematographic film of things would suffice and “style,” “literature” that departs from these simple givens would be an hors d'oeuvre—artificial. But was this really reality? (Proust)Taste maps our syndrome: our sin drone.Free will is too expensive except as a quid pro quo.As Dog Whistles become Pig Whistles, I Just Drink My Whiskey: My first (((loyalty))) is to those who oppose and actively resist the Republican Party (USA), Bolsanaro & co, the Ayatollah & his guard, the Tatmadaw, Putin, &c.You're only young once, if that. You're only old once too, at most. When I was young, I felt middle-aged. Old, I see that was exactly the sign of my youth.Diversity Training: “ . . . when the two of them were going to sit down at the table, the farmer insisted that the nobleman should sit at the head of the table, and the nobleman also insisted that the farmer should sit there because in his house his orders had to be followed; but the farmer, who was proud of his courtesy and manners, refused to do it, until the nobleman became angry, and putting both hands on his shoulders, he forced him to sit down, saying: ‘Sit down, you imbecile; wherever I sit will be the head of the table for you.’ ” (Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman)Responsibilities are for parents, teachers, and citizens, not for poets. Poetry abhors responsibility to the degree it is infatuated with responsiveness. (after Robert Duncan)All poetry is loco.Anti-binary is binary.There are no absolutes but there ought to be.Why is Jewface more acceptable than blackface? Does not a Jew bleed, even if he's a prick?I prefer to see non-Jews playing Jews in the movies. I don't think a Jew can play a Jew in a convincing way. Looking to the future, when we are able to have nonhumans play humans, I think we will find the same thing.Before starting your poem, check to sure there is enough available darkness.If you've got the time, we've got the bier.Johann Gottlieb Fichte: born on May 19, 1762, to a family of ribbon makers.No good poem goes unpunished.The literary academy is too often governed by mechanisms of discipline, control, and hierarchy—often while ostensibly critiquing discipline, control, and hierarchy. The desire seems to be to turn the humanities into a kind of pseudoscience; but restricting refences to a small group of professionally sanctioned works or styles is more the product of faddish hegemony and rationalization than any engagement with science.Just because someone is antisemitic is no reason to assume they are not.My optimism gives me the resilience to reject hope.Sponsored:“Pre-Owned Poems” is brought to you by the center for avant-garde comedy and stand-up poetry; the First Church, Poetic License; and by readers like you.Proust again: “ . . . on ne puisse imaginer que ce qui est absent” (one can only imagine what's absent). Just so: one cannot imagine what is present. Maybe the Orphic is not creating the world imagined but acknowledging it. I imagine nothing but am imagined by it.Melancholy is grief interrupted. Toggle to stay alive in experience.Damaged goods are better than rancid ones. Damage, at least, is in sight of repair.Universalism is relativism with a Christianizing fate.Reb O'Buoy was asked if treif could be included in a poem. “Poetry is neither kosher nor treif. It is commentary.”People who liked that aperçu also like this one.Don't sue me just because you don't like the soup.John Felstiner told me of plans for a Norton anthology of Jewish American literature. What will you include of Stein?–– We're not sure if we will include her.–– Isn't that like an anthology of Irish literature without Joyce?The left hand must not know even what the left hand is doing.If there is place for a comfort poem, there is also place for a discomfort poem. Comfort in poems quickly strays. Discomfort stays.Poems left on lifts, trains, platforms, buses, cabs, planes, theaters, and playgrounds and not reclaimed.I bow down to no one, not even gods. But I'll talk to anybody, even devils.everything is relative—you mean we are all relatives?—no. we're all different.—yes, my relatives are like that.It is just because of the crisis of social, racial, and economic justice, of the environment, the crisis for democracy, that poetry must go beyond the superficial and reductive and find new ways of reflecting on the world we share, so that we may change the world rather submitting to it. The struggle is over reality, who owns it, who controls it.The only thing worse than aesthetics is its absence.How many words are there for snow? It's an exaggeration to a in the of people for the the the the the the the the Robert has it in this poem from where has a the too, but is by the in and It out that is there are a of for or of as I write this in there is no on the or and the of is to be be in there are two words for most of them in the is never future, it's not even more on my so and what does a of (after of what's the in what's can't get the any more than I can break from But in the I the present with abhors relativism by is a product of time, not an we've been forced to so is American is by its is its not be a be its the of to the sense of the of the and the and that the of the the not even that they to a mirage of the other on and aesthetic by of a where truth is in a from most would not be at once a and place of is no is the of the don't out by the and the a broken pot is right a am for and the of justice is not my head on the you should be not the way I do when you do that you are to me and I it.The of the for is percent of the in the poem in the / no / a of / not in me / but in All on or in an in the of its a many without being completely a all of a its and into . . . . . and and and they are with and without and sometimes they are also just who in an is to poetry what is to poem, like has an that is from I don't a poem, it is time without in for a reason and sometimes that reason is no feel so in a way. in the the only itself in the form of those that to to . . and while form the of both my own and that of the that I The are I am not an of down even if I sometimes write It's more a you can it either way and the is on the But not to it as I prefer the that one the this you no after the so topsy-turvy that it to be made man so freedom is not in its social but in its poem can have a an that the person the poem is often popular But the kind of poetry I want its as a and of and resist the as as In their I have come up with a of sometimes for the or the social and and on a of or or that is too is not I don't like or or or which is not to that I am not in all those as a is not avant-garde it seems or like a I prefer the and to the and I don't like a way of art it's and and all those good But it has the same as it a too on people like us, our precedes as I am to my poetry I am more to the of which for I am nothing without my and family but this nothing is the of my poetry and my to this can either to with or we will the of The of took the out of my is got to take the by the the end of the day . . . is a don't write Jewish but Jewish (after it / / empty what is empty or what is is empty is and what is is a the I to see if my dead is down the I am not a being is not just they let people like me it its I But not God I one, absence the the the the not even that. that. ever are a an of the by Robert “ is really is like being in . . . you in a If you get it, it is like being If you it, it is like being in as put you've got you've got nothing to out of to I've been for a book by a poet I not When I find the book, I put it in a nearly place on my I want to the poems but to is it an for Jews to go to a on I it is not an it is a The is the and a in a your the had with an got so I got an a have become in their in is to say, the of the has been to one Poetry could be a of the of as by that it is the of poetry itself to right . . . can you that the the to as a and would . . . ” Poetry and to poetry from are by those who is the of in and in there to be I but I never could see what was only I find who I am who you echoes are but echoes . . . will get you of with your own no my place is lit up like my father would say, the is a doesn't like it when I But I am never sure he can a to but you can't make it The of the is not the same as the of the to a enough by something God told or a at the It out God told the to his from his comedy to the of and to a that ever new but even worse in which case it is truth both and or you but not on a of in the you think it me too is a poem in called There the by is no there as the of the then where no time there then when no time the absence of a God who is the of in of absence of the had / to be no the on a and are you doing on my asked not your it doesn't have your on said has no written on it is is the the the if I am on like on this is the too, when I am on it with asked and so is the when you it, the when you the when it over am the and of my where I of of is while is don't may not be the but it's a way is not the The is not the of also and its to one more into that and is a of There is I can't and no one from can't be the is to But can't to it or, for that not it is, at least, more than can hold back from the to do it and it's your but back is the single of sell don't is a and if it's not a a can seem even for a for is a need to change the and a into a of the by to find its said the of the to be in the said the was so old even his was or or or can I have to I never to from the have kind hurt can't never is The of just when we can sort of return to is a not a world putting in my precedes but absence of had itself to be the was a the was with as a with the words even as the being this In the was absence there this and nothing other The absence of absence is not other without is tyranny.In other is a of other If you can imagine the it other and the are other The is not other the is the other abhors a are who their own from which they to on qui the we are who from which we cannot or have you may as I that in is where we it's the place of our (for is an many I is not you or even is a it you take it as an end rather than a truth of the is in that are and the is that it's a that they are I I am not the but when I I I not but just as not but not what's but what not but what not that which is but what not but what is a that gives to me in The poems be of with the of of it new is so and make it the same is, and are to the of the Poetry is dead because the people that are it. The of I want are dead to those who In that is (for your If it was was too for your It goes without I will be if is I will out in if I will not if you I will you is what you can't only thing is and I not your on you've other put the before the if you want to tread a is a which is it they But that may more to our than those who of poetry and a avant-garde that is a of their other If do it, other Poetry has other I don't on with a house you can't the for may also be a of it an / I of take you to your