You are currently browsing the daily archive for May 29, 2011.
“Actually it helps if you’re not trying too hard. If you’re not too eager. You know? But try and tell a kid that.”
“And then a jet engine fell out of the sky and tore off her legs? I think maybe they re-attached one. You read about that, no?”
After he served terrific roast beef with potatoes and great salad, David Lau, a Chinese-Mexican-white poet and I were sympathizing with and criticizing Chicano poet professors for criticizing white poet professors for criticizing and excluding them from their universities and publications and poetry, and we were sympathizing with and criticizing white poet professors for criticizing and excluding Chicano poet professors from their departments and their anthologies and their poetry discussions, and we were sympathizing with both sides for certain few cogent points and criticizing both sides for their 1970s categorical thinking. I said to Laura and David that I agreed with David, as someone who is half something and half something else, I could never abide by those reductions and the limitations of that thinking. Universities and the publications and venues they sponsor only respond to racist exclusion through those categorical politics of the 1970s, but that how can they think that in poetry? How would these professors who purport to be poets think that anything can be just one way? The red wine and the port were gone and I thanked David and Laura and walked out in the fine mist around the streetlights. And in the morning I read Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Half-Mexican.” I read it fast and then I reread it slower.
David Lau, author of Virgil and the Mountain Cat
If itself is a calipers not understood like the marigolds by a man with the pistol banging at the door.
Catachresis is at once nettles and dandelion in a set of hex wrenches faithful to many children at hand.
Lissome prepositions are needle-nose pliers of Spanish broom and yucca mistaken by cops blocking off the street.
The reddened subjunctive is a ball peen hammer on the tin of peppercorns unnoticed by the sheriff dept. SWAT team.
The U.S. attorney general himself overlooked from the start participles open in a socket extension of flores de calabasa.
And will become a phillips screwdriver of persimmon and fig for neighbors frightened awake at 4:40 AM.
East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines 
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