How Did I Miss This?

Gary Sullivan is talking about poetry comics.

I Think the Rat Engravings and the Charles Simic Parody Are Related in Some Way

Why does God conspire to gulp so greedily the Fanta of my days? I've spent the past week reading and evaluating contest books, an activity that every year, without fail, temporarily extinguishes my desire to ever again molest tender paper with a single scuzzy word. When I wasn't doing that, I was:

1. Watching the hell out of some Carnal Knowledge, which I saw at the library and immediately pounced on, because: A) Art Garfunkel is in it, and B) I am obsessed with movies from the sixties and seventies that invoke the concepts of "castrating females" and "ballbusters," two terms which have regretfully fallen out of circulation in our modern age. Why, I have no idea, for is it not still true that women break dicks with their minds? Anyway, this wasn't as good as that movie where Elliott Gould is forced to visit prostitutes because his wife makes him impotent with her frigid brainwaves--what was that one called?--but almost.

2. Poring frenzily over rat engravings, for reasons of my own.

3. Inventing a new holiday, soon to be announced here. Hint: Jesus is going to plotz.

4. Writing a parody of Charles Simic that begins, "The wind calls things up like a poisoned cat." Picture soon to follow, of course.

Creature Porn Abyss: Part Two

How desperately bad do I want this for a future book cover? In the end, though, I'll probably settle for something along these lines:

Free to a Good Home

Here's a shameful admission: just now, in the throes of an extended spasm of brainstorming, I wrote the line, "unlicked animals in balls." I was 900 percent serious, and even had a frisson of that Lightning Has Struck My High-Flying Genius Kite Once Again feeling as I did it. It took me a moment to realize how close I had come to tumbling over an obscene precipice into a creature porn abyss. It reminds me of a trend I noticed a couple years back for people to write about various aspects of nature--sun, moon, and stars, usually--"fisting" themselves. Remember that? Remember all that fisting? Did it perhaps begin with Anne Sexton and her snail?

TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Federico García Lorca

Was it worth the wait or what? A flying dragon-frog gazes into the sunset. His eyes shine with a human radiance--or, in my version, embryos on fire. He exhales noisily and apologizes for his lack of tail. I considered whether I should paint him giving birth to a passel of jelly eggs midair, because I wanted to keep the midair birth theme going as long as I could, but the jelly eggs I managed to produce failed to meet my finicking standards of realism.

Any Day Now...

I will stab your eyes out with some Lorca. Patience, my beauties, patience. Making art is like jerking off a crocodile: it must be approached sideways with a freshly skinned hand. The way I do it, anyway.

Endorsement, Confession

These HumPo poems that Ron links to are exceedingly fine. I am partial to these in particular. Confidential to Gabriel Gudding, whose work in the world is never done: up till a minute ago I believed that a stoat was a kind of enormous mother pig; I think the words sow, teat, and stout had been somehow smashed together erotically by my fecund etymological imagination. (I have a nebulous grasp of animal details as it is--for instance, I don't understand why we can't drink horse milk, I have no idea where a rat's period goes, and I consistently picture giraffes as having impeccable small white beards.) I chanced to look it up, however, and discovered that a stoat actually looks like this. Good God, I would like to be pregnant with one of those right about now.

Who's Crying Now?

My truculent poem transformed itself, with a slurp and a flourish, into a tapeworm; my tum was filled with small gnaws whenever I thought about it, and I was forced to abandon it with considerable groaning. But! Now the eater becomes the eaten; I will descend upon it with intense creature violence and cannibalize it for parts; I will redouble my igor and make a new man. Onward and inward, little tapeworm. Onward and inward.