the MTA puts poems in the subway cars alongside the advertisements for laser hair removal, acne-scar banishment, erectile disfunction zapping and weightloss of an astonishing 75 lbs in just 2 weeks. the poems are part of the "poetry in motion" thing.
but what about poetry in static? some of the best poems are about things and people being stationary. i can't think of any right now, but i'm sure some poems are static and that some of them are among the best. of the entire poetry universe.
i'm no poet (though i did once have a haiku published online when cbc radio3 still had their e'zine online). but i thought i'd take a stab at poetry in static. please contribute some of your own efforts. and if we have enough, maybe we can publish an anthology (tentatively titled something really awful like "take a stand"):
molasses
doesn't move as slow
as me
on the couch
reaching for the remote control
the big one
turn the tv on
move think feel react for me.
where is andersen cooper today?
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Not mine, but perhaps acceptable fodder for your anthology:
Loiter
by Forrest Gander
I’ll know the time to leave the room
where I’ve been growing hair
from my face, drinking dark beers
when the light in the lake bums out.
That’s when fish
turn on their music.
They lie in a blue current
waiting for the moon
to pass over, and the fishermen
with their lanterns know this
as they spill a can of sweet corn
and wonder if they spoke
what they were just thinking.
I clear my way through the fog
as music will break through static.
The frogs strike up,
a window goes out
in the Home for Elders.
Don’t you wonder why
it is built far from anywhere,
as though memory needs a terrain
for forgetting; blind
driveways to lost roads.
As for my own parents, they did not
grow old. What I know:
dinners without conversation,
stars that shine for anyone.
I know my time
is brief. I know love of the cut sleeve.
I want to say
don’t feel sorry for men,
those who leave women
smouldering like cigarettes,
those who are fond of burials.
War is a habit of mind,
I swear by my mother’s gender.
Tonight sticks in the leaves
are slick as pilot snakes.
Wherever I part branches
no one is in a boat,
no one has stirred a wake.
Not jackknifing off the dock,
it’s hauling myself back up
that gooses my titties and makes my peter shrink.
Don’t wake the cottonmouths.
Summertime. If you were here
and you remembered to stash your smokes
in a Glad bag so they didn’t soak like mine
we’d fall quiet now as pollen
on water, I would
tell you the true story of Urashima
and the turtle.
Forrest Gander, “Loiter” from Rush to the Lake (Cambridge: AliceJames Books, 1988).
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