I really would like to stop working forever--never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now--and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone -- maybe even a man -- and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

Ginsberg in the 50s

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility.  Businessmen are serious.  Movie
producers are serious.  Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

America, Allen Ginsberg. (Re: Allen Ginsberg on Time Magazine.)

Time magazine on Allen Ginsberg?

Meditation on the cover of Time magazine.

"The next morning Dick came to class & in his coat he conseled a machedy," the boy wrote. "When the teacher told him to shut up he whipped it out & cut off her head. When the sub came 2 days later she needed a paperclip so she opened the droor. Ahh she screamed as she found Mrs. C's head in the droor."

originally posted by xowie

"O, damnation, damnation! thy other name is school-teaching and thy residence Woodbury."

"I believe when the Lord created the world, he used up all the good stuff, and was forced to form Woodbury and its denisens, out of the fag ends, the scraps and refuse."

originally posted by xowie

"O my God, this War on Terrorism is gonna rule!" one character tells another in David Rees's cult cartoon Get Your War On. "I can't wait until the war is over and there's no more terrorism!" Few campaigners in poetry's war on war will have hopes as inflated as Rees's clipart man, but the swiftness and volume of responses to the recent Gulf war have already resulted in several online anthologies, public interventions by Andrew Motion, Harold Pinter and Seamus Heaney, and now Paul Keegan and Matthew Hollis's 101 Poems Against War.

originally posted by xowie

Back at the Factory, things are going well. We make cockroach-size crucifixes, recliner chairs, beer, pornography, weapons of mass entertainment, extortion contracts, legislation to prevent justice, boots, arm bands, bumper stickers, baseballs, moms, apple pies, potato chips, depleted uranium ammo casings, soda pop, paraquat, genocide-silencers, cotton candy, bunker busters, embedded reporters, Cheer, Joy, thalidomide, Snickers, cyclamates, saccharine and talking anchorpuppets.

originally posted by xowie

The old men march slowly, all bones stiff and sore
they’re tired old heroes from a forgotten war
and the young people ask
‘What are they marching for?'
and I ask meself the same question,
but the band plays Waltzing Matilda.

- Eric Bogle.

originally posted by xowie

“Kerouac reminds us how hard this form really is. Only a couple of dozen of the hundreds of haiku in this collection really work.” Jack Kerouac’s Haiku.

Nude Interrogation
Did you kill anyone over there? Angelica shifts her gaze from the Janis Joplin poster to the Jimi Hendrix, lifting the pale muslin blouse over her head. The blacklight deepens the blues when the needle drops into the first groove of “All Along the Watchtower.” I don’t want to look at the floor. Did you kill anyone? Did you dig a hole, crawl inside, and wait for your target? Her miniskirt drops into a rainbow at her feet. Sandalwood incense hangs a slow comet of perfume over the room. I shake my head. She unhooks her bra and flings it against a bookcase made of plywood and cinderblocks. Did you use an M-16, a hand-grenade, a bayonet, or your own two strong hands, both thumbs pressed against that little bird in the throat? She stands with her left thumb hooked into the elastic of her sky-blue panties. When she flicks off the blacklight, snowy hills rush up to the windows. Did you kill anyone over there? Are you right-handed or left-handed? Did you drop your gun afterwards? Did you kneel beside the corpse and turn it over? She’s nude against the falling snow. Yes. The record spins like a bull’s-eye on the far wall of Xanadu. Yes, I say. I was scared of the silence. The night was too big. And afterwards, I couldn’t stop looking up at the sky.

Nude Interrogation, Yusef Komunyakaa, 1998.

Regime Change
Advancing down the road from Niniveh
Death paused a while and said 'Now listen here.
You see the names of places roundabout?
They're mine now, and I've turned them inside out.
Take Eden, further south: At dawn today
I ordered up my troops to tear away
Its walls and gates so everyone can see
That gorgeous fruit which dangles from its tree.
You want it, don't you? Go and eat it then,
And lick your lips, and pick the same again.
Take Tigris and Euphrates; once they ran
Through childhood-coloured slats of sand and sun.
Not any more they don't; I've filled them up
With countless different kinds of human crap.
Take Babylon, the palace sprouting flowers
Which sweetened empires in their peaceful hours -
I've found a different way to scent the air:
Already it's a by-word for despair.
Which leaves Baghdad - the star-tipped minarets,
The marble courts and halls, the mirage-heat.
These places, and the ancient things you know,
You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

originally posted by xowie

Clarity
I think what you'll find,
I think what you'll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.
And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing 

originally posted by xowie

Most Americans don’t do blood sacrifice, except for giving blood to the Red Cross.

Most Americans don’t kill goats or sheep or chickens ritually. If they drink the blood of Christ it’s wine or grape juice.

As we watch the reports of our fighting men making the ultimate sacrifice we don’t see mangled bodies and blood, but faces of family pain and official piety. Mothers say he died doing what he loved in service of a cause he believed in.

We change the blood into fine noble wine. The Secretary of Defense is already tipsy. Our now-dry President is in the grip of a mortal addiction.

originally posted by xowie

Bastard, by M. Shahid Alam.

originally posted by daiichi

          Let her now take off her hat in summer air the contour
Of cornfields     and have enough time to kick off her one remaining
Shoe with the toes     of the other foot     to unhook her stockings
With calm fingers, noting how fatally easy it is to undress in midair
Near death     when the body will assume without effort any position
Except the one that will sustain it

originally posted by daiichi

By now the poetic groove was really cooking. Harold and Andrew were just riffing on the whole vibe.

"Whoa, the oil is very viscous," wailed Andrew.

"Yeah, our politics is Robert Fiskous," Harold responded.

originally posted by daiichi

Weep over my corpse, if you can weep tears of wine.
Sigh dejectedly for me, if you are intoxicated and carefree.
Bear me on your shoulders, if you stumble drunkenly along.
Cremate me on that land, where there once was a tavern.

originally posted by xowie

CAUSA BELLI by Andrew Motion

They read good books, and quote, but never learn
a language other than the scream of rocket-burn.
Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad:
elections, money, empire, oil and Dad.

originally posted by daiichi

Visitors to the exhibit will be encouraged to make their own cow poetry by taking a tiny cardboard cow, writing a word on it and setting it down on the vibrating board from an old electric football game so it can wander and interact with other cows.

originally posted by xowie

bogus holidays make me tired, at blue period.

originally posted by daiichi

Supreme Court judges take issue with rhyming colleague.

originally posted by daiichi

Giant guitar
of light-strummed
at dusk
it rests
by the intersection
Tuning not itself
like the organ keys
in a haunted house
but us
To make us see
we are the keys
and it the organist
invisible guitar player
of no spooky music.

originally posted by daiichi

What would you do on poetry’s behalf?

originally posted by xowie

Lemon taught himself to read and write while incarcerated. Nine years ago, he watched poets performing at a community center. "I never knew they were poets," he says. "I thought they were rappers."

originally posted by xowie

The Name on My Cross

April 23, 1990
Fort Benning, Georgia

Juan Ramon Moreno S.J.,
I carried your cross
in the circular procession today,
shaking my rattle.

I confess
I leaned on your cross a little
during the speeches,
rattling my applause.
Then looked over my shoulder.

The soldiers stood
in little motionless groups
as if posing for photographs with their
personnel carriers,
in battle camouflage and riot gear.
They watched.
I couldn’t tell if they listened.

I hoisted your cross
and turned your name around to face them.
Not to accuse anyone:
I wanted to feel the weight of the wood.
And I wanted them to notice
You had a name.
Not just another dark-skinned man on a cross.

- Stephen Wing

originally posted by xowie

''I'm not sure it will encourage people to read poetry ... But it does show poetry is moving to a more robust condition in America. It's returning a bit closer to the center of cultural life than it was 15 or 20 years ago.''

originally posted by daiichi

"I fixed my teeth, bought a new computer and started the project," Saidenberg says. "I wanted to run it as a collective, because of my background working as an activist. It was really important that it not just be me publishing my friends."

originally posted by daiichi