Desert City Poetry Series

[Ken Rumble <rumblek AT bellsouth.net>]

Please spread far and wide.....

Who:  Kent Johnson; translator of _Doubled 
Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki 
Yasusada_, _The Miseries of Poetry: 
Traductions from the Greek_, and Immanent 
Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz_; 
winner of an NEA Fellowship; inventor of the 
mustache.

Who:  Patrick Herron; Carrboro Poet Laureate; 
author of _The Amerian Godwar Complex_; 
wicked good at the Full-gainer.

What:  Desert City Poetry Series: March 
squared, double your pleasure.

When:  This Saturday, March 26th, at 8pm, 2005.

Where:  Internationalist Books, 405 W. 
Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC, third 
planet from the Sun.

Why:  "Not to mention that the one whose name 
is Love is in the form of a faucet."  "I am 
sprung / atom / by / atom. / I am / 
decomposed, / I am / stirred / into / root / 
and / softly / charged / clouds."

See you there.....

Next Reading:

April 23rd:  Lisa Jarnot & Andrea Selch

*Internationalist Books:
http://www.internationalistbooks.org

*Desert City Poetry Series:
http://desertcity.blogspot.com

*Kent Johnson:
http://jacketmagazine.com/bio/kent.html

*Patrick Herron:
http://www.proximate.org/bio.htm

Contact the DCPS:  Ken Rumble, director:
rumblek at bellsouth dot net

"Poem Upon a Typo Found in an Interview of 
Kenneth Koch, Conducted by David Shapiro [1]"
by Kent Johnson

1.   First of ill, I fell in love.

2.   I could, of course, go on and on.

3.   The gapeseed trees leaned down; the 
humors of a flying thing broke swith in a 
deafening whoosh.

4.   Well, certes, this just shows our tholen 
souls have been braided everywhen as one.

5.   And therefrom, the sun shone down thro 
the missled hole upon the praying ones and.

6.   It was full of smoke in that dome, fore 
the days of no smoking.

7.   I remember those good old days, whilom 
it was me, and Will and Ben and Chris and the 
wholesome lads of the laste avant-garde.

8.   And always, eke, that tother, the girl 
whose number was a misterium to me.

9.   She blew out some rings and did say: It 
seems I am losing my trellis of thought, 
rushing with you through this tunnel of 
trees, whitherward our fate we canst know, 
nor whencesoever we have come, nor usward 
what speeds.

10.   For there are coins where once there 
were our eyne.

11.   I liked the little hussy that way, 
naked but for a brassiere, how she could say 
the darndest things and with such casual 
mien, as if a kind of chord falling from her 
spine were plugged into some vast background 
dump of language.

12.   (Exaltingly, eftsoons, I sawed her in 
the sweven of the flowering trees. She was a 
plane girl, really, ilke, fain and yare, with 
wings all swoopstake on her thorax plus eyne 
of tinsel shillings. Stilled, I lived her 
with all my might, chasing a horse amain into 
the sun. You’d never know it now from my 
face. It was more archaic than it now seems, 
was more like the sun. Stained and 
morning-breathèd, we woke in Atocha, to 
puissant concussions alow the ground.)

13   (a). My nickname at Christ’s College was 
“Beuys”; I spent five years in its crucifixed 
sanatorium, whence, a foil upon my temples, 
great voltage did floode my soiled bodie.

13   (b). But, anyway, to continue and for 
exemplars: Please observe how in this amber 
light the prints of the figs are perfectly 
preserved and.

14.   Not to mention that the one whose name 
is Love is in the form of a faucet.

15.   And should it seem at the end of every 
verse that I am washing my hands of the 
people and cranes whom I have hammered into 
this foil for fun, well, then that is the way 
of the silly sun.

16.   Lit from within, as if the fractures in 
the loveliness were intentionally stressed to 
the point where it all might just come apart, 
but not yet quite.

17.   Peradventure, as if to illustrate, the 
giant exchange student from the colonies, 
entered the foiled room.

18   (a). Roman and ebonied, eyes whited by 
the burn, he cried forth and broke the spell:

18   (b). How come is a bus in a desert on 
fire, he did say, gardyloo. [2]

19.   Prithee, thee, quickly, now, break thro 
this water! (unidentified female voice in the 
room)

20.   For don’t you know, dude (the giant 
continued), that’s what your hair will be: 
Flames shooting upward until you wouldn’t see 
because it were so high up there.

21.   I know it sound incredible, somedeal, OK?

22.   And I know you be sad and happy at a 
great flip-flop velocity.

23.   But I shit you not: Stop clapping, hug 
your kin, and look immediately at the sky.


"Tough Going?"
by Patrick Herron

Tough going?
When your week is over, you’ll be closer to 
your goal.
Everything is a part of learning to live in a 
different way.
While it is critical to note some mistakes, 
it is also essential not to dwell on them.
Just move on.
Toward the end of this week, take a look at 
yourself in the mirror.
Compare yourself to your “before” photo.
Do you see yourself now?
Chances are, you’ve already lost some memories.
Your beliefs have begun to sharpen.
If you’re analyzing yourself or trying to 
recall last week, you may notice that your 
numbers are improving.
Yes, it’s happening.
You can believe more and remember less.
Now keep it going.
Assess, adjust, and move forward.

There's a war on.