Kevin Young is only the Steven King of poetry in his level of output and thickness of books. There are two sections in his collection Dear Darkness that are made up entirely of odes to food. While every section of his book is excellent, and I want to come back and do another interaction or two with it, I also really enjoyed writing about food as opposed to love or family. I'm also planning on posting a remix of this poem, in the vain of Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts, which I read before I knew who Kevin Young was. Ode To The Alligator In Pirate Soup
Adam Stone Living in Florida didn't teach me anything about The South. Except that every job interview asked my religion before my qualifications. And if you put on a play making fun of the KKK, a dozen white men will walk out. But there are racists in The North, too. Missing home, I found a seafood restaurant with New England Clam Chowder on the menu. What came out was red and thinner than the chef's excuse Of course it's New England Clam Chowder. Let me show you the can it came out of. Refusing the obviously Manhattan Chowder, I ordered something forgettable with alligator. Did not remember the dish for years. I am sorry I forgot you alligator. Sorry our next encounter was a joke about the food cycle as Simon, Maybe, and I got drunk and fed hot dogs to the baby alligators in the caged moat of a mini-golf course before crossing the street to eat gator nuggets. Disrespectfully fried reptiles kept frozen in the back and on the menu until tourist season. I am sorry our second meeting was so cheap. That I forgot you every time I left that flaccid peninsula. I was in a panic when I saw you in the exotic meats aisle of the fancy food retailer. I was surprise cooking a thirteen course meal with mostly improvised recipes based on the titles of Dr. Who episodes. Silurians! I thought. They are reptilian. Alligators are reptilian. And I pulled stack after stack of you from the refrigerator. Bagged you with lamb and beef and sausage and all the common beasts. I bought too much of you. Split you into recipes you shouldn't belong in. But you were the perfect accent in a stew. Held your own in a flavor battle against chicken in the battle of bay leaves. I couldn't stop inventing reasons for you to appear in my kitchen. It was Dean who suggested I open up a roadside alligator restaurant. How you sriracha bleeding off my menu. How you pepper toothed in stew. How you oyster sauced and brown sugared. How you sweet. How you spice. All these roles usually cast for beef and chicken you could fill. I can open a roadside diner like I can open waterpark in Manitoba. I can. I just don't know how. Or why. But I've started stupider ventures. None of them starring as dependable partners as you.
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April Penn's response to Dear Darkness, like my own, involves food and hunger. Maybe don't read this book while fasting. Reader Response Poem to Kevin Young’s Dear Darkness
April Penn So this is what the past tastes like ~ Kevin Young, “Ode to Cushaw” You search everywhere in the cemetery, but you can’t find your great grandfather’s grave. Instead, you delight in odes of the food he may have eaten. Hunger never leaves, craving always the next poem for okra, grits, crawfish, catfish, black eyed peas, Gumbo, sweet potato pie, watermelon… You say, “like rice/ you rise,” (Ode to Boudin) -- the transcendence of food, not magic but history trying to taste your tongue. Eating your most edible story, figs of smoke. So sweet and vanishing an author, a lost uncle memory of a man burning too bright. I forgot how much I enjoy remixing poems. Here's the restructured ode from my Kevin Young interaction. This may inspire more remixes later. Ode To The Alligator In Pirate Soup (Remixed For Stew)
Adam Stone You Silurian You reptile walking out out of forgettable Winner of the battle of bay leaves Brown sugar toothed Sriracha bleeding off your dependable I feed you hotdogs and open The South in your Florida (that flaccid peninsula) Pull you out of freezers stacked with common beasts You are the missing in my job interview a roadside attraction a religion for tourist season You panic bagged in perfect accent missing common peppered waterpark of qualifications You are thirteen courses of refusing Crossing the street to exotic Fancy surprising in a caged moat of oyster sauce Never frozen disrespectfully or fried joke I'm sorry I forgot you bagged you in recipes with lamb and sausages I couldn't stop inventing stupider reasons to split you from my kitchen I have written an entire manuscript of interactions with Nicole Terez-Dutton's If One Of Us Should Fall. We even did a show together where we went back and forth between her poems and my interactions. This new poem is a combination of themes she explores in the book: the constant motion/traveling of the book's narrative, and the book's rhapsodizing of potential in the "Almost" poems. A Catalog Of Places We've Almost Been
Adam Stone California was an accident of possibility and sunlight Neither of us wanted temperance We considered kansas The flatness of your mother's eyes when the tow truck driver gifted me your last name Her voice dipped lake champlain I want to talk about your eyes No map Traveling by instinct Vast and only partially chartable But we don't talk anatomy We discuss only the immediate future New orleans The dakotas We don't talk about the place we agreed not to talk about anymore Happy Content Honest Our bloodstreams intersection clogged with montana until even mosquitoes couldn't taste the difference between us It was only a matter of time before this project went meta. Seventeen days, to be exact. Jeffrey McDaniel's The Splinter Factory is one of my favorite collections to read and reread. This time, I read it front to back on a bus trip and then went back and siphoned out my favorite lines to structure a conversation around I hadn't intended said conversation to be about why I'd missed some deadlines in this project, but that's what ended up happening. As is the norm, any text in black was written by me, italicized blue text is from Jeffrey McDaniel's book. The title of this poem is also from a line by McDaniel, in which he describes how one goes crazy. One Marble At A Time
I promised myself I'd read a book of poetry a day the way I promised my mother I'd call once a week the way I promised I'd get my homework done the way I promised I'd tell whoever it was that year how I felt about them the way I promised I'd eat better I'd start running I'd drink less soda I'd forgive whoever it was that year the way a kitten promises frolic the way a bus schedule promises ibuprofen the way a road trip promises silence When I am confronted by the screeching car alarm of a deadline I get so lost in the hideous intoxication of the honk how you can tell in what year they bought that useless alarm based on how familiar the rhythm you and all your neighbors deliberately ignore I get so lost that I forget it's supposed to signal urgency I broke my word so many times, it became a handful of crumbs I sprinkled at my father's ankles whenever I needed money. It's so easy to dress my parents in all of my failures not because my father didn't remember my birthday enough or my mother never forgets to carry my most embarrassing childhood experiences in her purse but because they spent so much of my teenage years trying on my blame in the department store mirrors of my eyes that it's difficult to imagine them without it Every time I have dinner with a parent they drop a hundred on my plate until I sing the misery of their ex-spouse I'm the canary watching multiple coal mines via Skype Each of them twenty years removed from shared bank accounts Forty-five years removed from a ring and a question neither of them budgeted for I wonder how that question gets popped. Is it like a bottle of expensive champagne, or a big, ugly, zit that won't go away? My mother has never once not ever forgotten even a single time to ask who I am seeing I always say a therapist and thank her for asking But I can't see therapists the way dogs can't see color In that they can see color but differently than humans and have no way of expressing how they see My mother never laughs at this joke of my solitude but always offers to pay for my next meal She always predicts what her husband will order because he is not so much a creature of habit as a varmint of obsession When I eat with them I am expected to still be seventeen and growing in every way but diet Instead of salt and pepper, I'd like a think layer of antique store dust enthusiastically sprinkled on the lettuce, so halfway through the sandwich, a wave of nostalgia will wash over me If it isn't my parents' fault that I am less behind and more rolling beneath deadlines of my own design then can I blame desire How I could read a recipe book for inspiration and spend the rest of the night tasting a stranger determined to know the precise ratio of ingredients that led him to the awkward of us I mean, isn't it odd—how you can buy a lap dance, phone sex, or blow job in a snap, but can't pay a person a dollar just to sit next to you on a park bench and simply hold your hand? Oh, I've been down that road before. In fact, I still have property there So let's pretend my commitment issues and my love have never accidentally sat down across from each other on a train and spent the entire trip pretending they're strangers Let's say I miss deadlines like they are highway exits and I'm not driving but I am distracting the driver Let's say I miss deadlines like they stop calling me and I don't want them to think I need them any more than they need me so I don't call them either Let's say I miss deadlines like the only way I can communicate with my responsibilities is via Ouija board or speculative fiction Let's say I am so Over deadlines But that's not in the cards. Heck, it's not even in the casino. I often feel I'm not emotionally invested in anything to miss it Deadlines sure and sometimes people also but money when I'm broke love when I'm alone That nostalgia sprinkled on a sandwich is to impress you I can't even taste it April Penn is the first...multiple interactor to meet....all their deadlines...mainly because...April is awesome...here she uses haiku to tackle...Nikki Giovanni's ellipses addiction. Reader Response Haiku
(Responding to Those Who Ride the Night Winds by Nikki Giovanni) April Penn … Why the ellipses? Are they the uncharted path of riding night winds? Ellipses, leaving room for air and for lost words needing new worlds. Why the ellipses? To move close to the body, to refrain losses? … To select the scraps, the poet muses with time, quilting lived garments. … You do not love wrong or by mistake, always love, find heroes in self. … Colored people couldn’t vote… couldn’t use the bathroom in public places… couldn’t go to the same library they paid taxes for… had to sit on the back of the buses… couldn’t live places… work places… go to movies… amusement parks… Nothing if you were colored … Just signs … always signs … saying No … No … No… (From “Harvest (for Rosa Parks)”) The sign that says no Everywhere no no no no-- racist exclusion. … Love should change your life. Move you beyond the boundary of your stubborn self. Giovanni says, Love Thoughts like a song, a drum, a music in you. … A good writing prompt: Begin with, “You were gone like…” then fail to compare. Champion of the joy that cries out lonely, someone to sing for, to love. Ariel Baker-Gibbs ruminates on moving, maps, and mountains after reading Sherman Alexie's What I've Stole, What I've Earned, which she has rated "top notch". Interaction With Sherman Alexie's What I've Stolen, What I've Earned
Ariel Baker-Gibbs i like packing more than unpacking. i like packing away things in boxes because everything fits together and i can look at all of it at once, even when it doesn’t make sense, like why would the head scratcher nestle so perfectly on top of a scarf that’s next to a bag of q-tips that are on top of books on top of a map. the map which was given to me by my mother’s childhood friend, whose husband died of a heart attack two days ago on the island. and the map is of the island. as a child i had gone on his fishing boat across the lines that i can see on the map, of depth and of height. the island is a mountain in the water, and the island is still a mountain. and we can see the lines as they appear on the cliffs and mountains of the island. we can see how real they are, how true. the island is still unresolved treaty land. this is also on a map. up here, the fishing town where i was born, bearing the name of the K’ómoks band, holding the round letters of Comox. the round circles of topography, the vertical conclusion of a mountain into thin air. this is how we do and how we claim. we say nobody knows who it belongs to, we just know who went there before and we know who goes there now. we draw it up, we write it down. we prevaricate. it feels like it belongs to us. it belongs by not belonging. it does not belong to us but we paid money for it. what it is worth to be in a place. to be soothed by its beauty, that soothed so many. to be not from it, but to come to it, even from birth. to love it uneasily and helplessly. we eat fish from the strait and potatoes from the garden and everything tastes like earth’s butter. we sit there and look at the same silhouette of the mountains behind the mountains as has been there for years and years and they remain etched on our retinas long after it becomes dark. that line stays. In Sherman Alexie's What I've Stolen, What I've Earned he toys with an unusual form of sonnet. There is no rhyme scheme. There is only a loose concept of couplets. It's one justified blob of fourteen numbered ideas. I've tried to be strict with my own ideas of coupleting and making the foot adhere to my idea of what a sonnet foot should be. I'm still not in love with giant justified blob with numbers in it, and I might reformat it later, but here it adheres to Alexie's visual formatting. Sonnet With Forgotten Phone Numbers
Adam Stone 1. She says she says she says that she is losing what she says her memory was because of her damned she says cell phone. 2. It used to be I needed to remember all of these numbers. Everyone close and familiar was a seven digit she says nickname. If they moved away they became ten she says and easier to forget. Now everyone is a picture if I remember to take it, she says a ringtone if I remember how those work she says but most often I don't answer my phone anymore because I don't know she says who anyone is. 3. She says a lot of stupid shit. 4. But maybe she's right this time. 5. She says also that she misses landlines and rotaries both on the phone and the road. There's something so satisfying she says about circles How you never know when you're finished with something or when something is beginning. 6. She says she misses typewriters even though all the letters are on the keyboard of a computer that can remember things that even 1980s typewriters couldn't hold in their memory. 7.That's just it she says I don't want to trust some machine to remember how I felt while I was typing a letter. I want to see the paper. She says. I want to see where I dented the paper. She says I want to see the stories scars as they happen. She says I don't want to watch it happen on some screen and wait for it to print out later. 8. I say You would have made a lousy x-ray technician. 9. She says something she says I can't hear because she says newfangled phones are always breaking up. 10. She says this over a 1992 barely cordless phone where all the numbers have been fingered away. 11. She doesn't say fingered of course that's my word. She doesn't acknowledge the physically missing numbers on her phone. It's the numbers in her memories she's concerned with. 12. She says click click she says static she says something I can't hear because she's moved too far away from the base. 13. The call cuts out which she will surely blame my cellphone for though I will be using it to check my bank account while she will be slamming her phone with her fist and pressing the useless buttons on the base. 14. She will try and remember where she put the notebook with my phone number in it because she can't remember which button on her phone used to say Redial. My idea for an interaction with Paul Guest's My Index Of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge came pretty early on. He has a couple of poems called "Audio Commentary", and I thought it would be fun to revisit a movie that I hadn't seen in over a decade, and watch it with the sound and subtitles off and write a poem to it. I spent a couple off weeks fighting with writing a poem about Police Academy IV but it's tough to laugh about police these days. I thought I might have to scrap the idea completely when someone brought up Gremlins 2 in conversation, and I realized it would make a great Self-Help poem. Audio Commentary: Gremlins 2 The New Batch
Adam Stone The sidekick becomes the main attraction and nothing works out Flattened Belittled Dressed for spectacle New york Limo in the gutter A television asks an ancient stereotype to change into the costume of expectations The past refuses Even the parody of the future looks dated The gentrification of history relocates love into science Remember when you could smoke in buildings as long as you were off the clock The introduction of those important enough to survive the plot The adorability of depression Everyone who wants is blind to the prize's needs Sometimes rules are broken by chance Sometimes the next generation seems unrecognizable yet familiar Devouring Infestation Everything on video Putting the mimes back in boxes Love is always a misunderstading The monsters have taken over the television studios It's raining doom The monsters dress just like us now Shred them Evacuate the extras Invite your enemies into your arms Let science improve your chances of survival Adapt Become a smarter monster Surrender your desire to become something permanent Interrupt your own narrative for a gag To beg cameo from a different kind of monster Opportune Explore your identity as a monster capable of being desired Evolve Confront the parts of yourself no one believes in Put your devil on hold Allow yourself to get caught to find out who will come to rescue you When you recognize the demon in yourself kill it in front of everyone Burn down your progeny to save your now Stage a musical number to horrify the people who've stuck with you Give your demons everything they've dreamed then use them to kill each other When the rescue party comes reveal how you've already saved yourself Show them how you keep the potential of your future undoing in a box Shine a bright light on it I'm probably going to come back and take another write at Richard Siken's Crush. I did a poem based on his style back in January. I planned on writing something about dreams, which he kept coming back to in Crush. But I kept thinking of Ariel Baker-Gibbs poem about boring people by talking about dreams. And then I thought I had a poem about my father to write, and I did, but it turned out to be something completely different. Smells Like Smells Like Teen Spirit
Adam Stone In the still of the night the street steams at the lack of cars If it can not be pure earth again It at least wants to feel used My father lives alone since his second wife And can no longer hear that song Shoo doop Shoo be doo The original is safe But the cover version was their wedding song (so real, so right) But didn't he also dance with my mother to this same song Never the original Songs with nostalgia for other songs never impressed me Smells like smells like teen spirit Odes to odes Dust to dust Is all sex nostalgia for other sex Even first sex nostalgia for something we've heard about Seen on tv The night never seems still Even when it is quiet some piece of the sky moves Some city burns distant Some animal asserts dissatisfaction with human sleep habits My father doesn't sleep well Does he stay awake remembering life before this barren I don't know I don't sleep well either Is my whole existence just some cover of his own A slightly different time structure But the same chorus |
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