BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice features fiction by Joseph Riippi and art by Jessica Miller.

When I was six years old I loved basketball and hated church. I dreamed in Spalding orange. Traffic cones, life vests, reflective spray paint and plastic pieces of fruit. I had an orange bike, orange bunk bed, orange crayons worn to their nubs from the orange drawings made during Mass. When I asked my mother what to pray for while others went up for Communion, she said to talk to grandpa (who died before I knew him). Tell him what your life is like, she said. Tell him about your new orange bike. Tell him about your friends. Ask him to watch over you. I knelt in church and remembered the one memory I had. Repeated it until it was fake:

My grandfather in a chair. A Frisbee. He is too sick to play; I go outside and throw the Frisbee in the air to myself. Orange on blue. I don’t remember what the house smells like. I don’t remember his favorite color.

It felt like talking to a stranger, and so I asked God to help me play basketball for the Chicago Bulls. I prayed to be like Michael Jordan. I want to be like Mike, I strained, and clenched my hands together against the pew before me. I imagined myself in a Gatorade commercial; I saw myself in black and white. I sweated orange.

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and art by Deborah Randall.

On August 27, 1959—or was it September 3?—a fresh and enigmatic cultural movement was supposedly born, according to which the poem might be located “at last between two persons instead of two pages.” But if one may as well make a phone call (or send an email) as compose a poem, does the choice of form—blank verse over Instant Message, for example—reveal the poet as a narcissist, a poseur intellectual fixated on fame?

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by John Thomas and art by Dread Scott.

Peter Moysaenko Emerson reminds us that the vital poem amounts to more than mere meter but rather the message behind it, just as Frost insists that in the vocalization of patterned syllables lies inherent meaning. According to your own practical model of poetics—how you undertake the self-generative action of verse—do you typically find that a poem arrives first as idea, or does its sound precede it? Or are the two aspects utterly inseparable, mutually dependent?

John Thomas More often than not, it begins with a notion or an image. Yet I’m also responsible for a number of poems that were triggered by sound alone. “Contrabass” is a hybrid of sorts—I was initially approaching the idea of a specific range of sound. Regardless of origin, once a poem has a pulse, mouthfeel, rhythm, enjambment, and a great many other things become incredibly important. All of these elements can communicate with one another if the poet has the patience to develop those relationships. Proceeding from there is a matter of solving simultaneous equations. Ideally, they should all agree.

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Kirk Nesset and art by Steve Giovinco.

Peter Moysaenko W.C. Williams writes, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Yet can one reasonably expect any poem to offer lasting forbearance from misery in life or death, that is, without food on the table and a drink in the glass, without a clutch of minor comforts, how can one speak of happy perseverance or a peaceful end—after all, what in the poem cannot be found elsewhere in the ever evolving world?

Kirk Nesset I don’t think Williams is suggesting that poetry can do much to comfort or fortify us if we are suffering and miserable. But difficult as some poems are to sort through, he implies, we need them as a civilization, highly-evolved as a species as we believe ourselves to be. They teach us openness, tolerance, compassion, respect, and love for all things animate and inanimate, and reconnect us to humanity—to the deeper, more enduring parts of ourselves.

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Jacob Boyd and art by Leah Oates.

Peter Moysaenko Can poetry, as genre, achieve popular cultural appeal while retaining the import of its communication; or, for instance, does one’s foray into new mass media effectively preclude the possibility of an authentic artistic venture?

Jacob Boyd I’ve learned by listening to people who excel at their jobs not to concern myself with other artists’ intentions. Whether an artistic venture is “authentic,” whether a poem is worth taking seriously, I judge on an individual basis—based on a gut reaction. I do value sincerity, openness, and accessibility, and I don’t see any reason why new mass media would limit their presence in poems. It’s interesting that while slam poetry and rap have gained momentum, the internet and graphic design have also allowed for poetry to test its visual mettle. I have no doubt, though, that I will always prefer poetry that looks and behaves something like Robert Frost’s poems. Something moderate, in terms of presentation. Which leads me to the initial question: can poetry achieve popular cultural appeal without losing relevance? I think so. One of these days it will win Prom Queen and the Nobel Peace Prize.

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Dawn Marie Knopf and art by Todd Hido.

Peter Moysaenko So goes the story that James Wright, upon reading his son’s first attempts at verse, wrote to him, “I’ll be damned. You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.” Do you figure that a poem serves as a manner of balm or as an extremity probing a wound: does a fit poem aim at the amplification of human feeling or does its task rather concern an approach of quietude, of reconciliation?

Dawn Marie Knopf The image of the poet puts significant pressure on the poet and on poetry. How easily can we conjure up images of a lonely, white-clad Dickinson or a disheveled Berryman contemplating the bridge? For better or worse, we inherit these images because we place biography alongside poetry—through introductions written by esteemed critics, the first five minutes of a literature class, or the rumor chain whispered at the hip parties of today. The poet might even, but not necessarily, braid biography into a poem. The thing is, everyone suffers. Life is suffering. No one is touched by the poetry divining rod just because they live in Hell on Earth (oh and the poetry divining rod is myth too). The poet’s mental health is beside the point. I’ve grown tired of this celebration of the madness of the maker. What we should celebrate is the sensational madness in the poem. We should celebrate the muscle car exploding past the makeshift checkered flag. We should celebrate art roaring, which, strangely, can only be achieved through quiet and emotionally astute seduction. When it comes down to it, a poem’s success can be measured by how quietly the poet observes a fire-breathing, murderous riot.

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Weston Cutter and art by Peter Hildebrand.

Weston Cutter turns his regard to the rare enigma of the quotidian: shunning any suggestion of pretension in favor of an Ammonsian phrasing, “No Science” mulls over clues pulled from their contexts, tapping into questions of exclusion and intrusion, the thin distinction between durability and stability.

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Yael Shinar and art by R.D. Gluibizzi.

Peter Moysaenko Adrienne Rich—hearkening perhaps the spirit of late ’60s feminist thought—has intimated that poetry, by virtue of being “root-tangled in the grit of human arrangements and relationships,” figures as a necessarily political medium. But is such a claim only a willful conflation of connotation: to what degree may a poem be expected to persuade public policy, to effectively address the demands of a massed citizenry, to significantly alter systems of government and economy; and anyway, should such achievements remain as any of its concern?

Yael Shinar To me, it is obvious that poetry is political. I am a student of Adrienne Rich’s work.

When I read, I am open and willing to be transformed; when I am transformed, my political life is transformed, including my intimate relationships and my voting in elections.

Who or what transforms me? I don’t know. Transformation occurs as an interaction among several parts. Adrienne Rich helped me to see that.

I met Adrienne Rich, briefly, in 2002. I said, “Thank you for your work. Your writing changed my life.”

She said, “No. You changed your life—you opened a book.”

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Joseph Chapman and art by Makoto Take.

Peter Moysaenko “At the Savoy” speaks through the persona of jazz musician and bandleader William Henry Webb, and its ultimate line echoes the Catalonian poet Joan Maragall i Gorina’s petition for clemency in the wake of la Setmana Tràgica. In your view, does a particular poetic voice succeed by its achievement of plurality—a Whitmanian sense of one for all, all as one—or by its distillation of incomparable idiosyncrasy: and if a poem may indeed fail, what then has been lost?

Joseph Chapman Well, I wish I had intended the echo of Joan Maragall i Gorina’s essay asking for the pardon of protestors in Catalonia in the wake of la Setmana Tràgica. It would have been a perceptive sentiment: that African Americans in New York suffered similar marginalization and oppression as the Catalonian workers of Barcelona. Sadly, I haven’t read any of Maragall i Gorina’s work—I was very proud of myself after writing the final line of this poem, and I believe I even said to myself, “That’s a damn fine phrase, ‘City of Pardon.’ ” It’s likely I heard the phrase somewhere, that it took up residence in me, and then came to me (stripped of its context and past) when the poem needed it.

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by John Randolph Carter and art by Mark Miller.

Peter Moysaenko Does surrealist figuration serve as only a temporary—or even ersatz—plug against a sense of existential lack; that is, do you regard imaginative play as a tenuous diversion, or as a corrective force within corporeal domains?

John Randolph Carter Corrective force within corporeal domains. I like to follow my mind as if it were a stream meandering down a hill, speeding up, slowing down, taking unexpected turns. I don’t want to know ahead of time what the next word will be or the next image or how it all is going to end (if it does end). I write in order to find out. I like to surprise myself, and I do everything I can to make that possible. My landscape is my mind, and I need speed and candor. What is important is that I allow what is real to emerge unedited and uncensored. What is real to me is what is born of necessity—candid, raw, vital, urgent, natural, direct, resonant.

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Howard Altmann and art by Kry Bastian.

Peter Moysaenko In the preface to your first book of poems, Who Collects the Days, you quote Stanley Kunitz as proposing “that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once.” How might you say that repetition functions within your verse? Do you suppose that lyrical reiteration serves as an incantatory and liberating measure—transforming meaning, transcending the quotidian routine—or does the gesture of return, of refrain, rather hammer home a sense of exasperation with, and futility within, the world?

Howard Altmann With the disclaimer that I am a deficient and reluctant interpreter of my poems, I’d say the refrain serves as an echo to our subconscious yearnings and our conscious realignments—the soul wants, the days do. If there is any reverberating note to Stanley Kunitz’s “we are living and dying at once” it might be “we are hoping and despairing at once.” Though there is an elegiac tone in the poem that cannot be denied, the lyric repetition is less about the futility in the world, than it is about the human spirit’s desire to trump it—to live, to live, to live. To paint our rooms, if we must.

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features poetry by Renée Ashley and art by Simona Frillici.

Peter Moysaenko How do you differentiate between factuality and facticity, between fiction and falsehood; or do such questions represent rather the inconsequential territories of a semantic concern?

Renée Ashley The meanings of truth—or of the words that constellate around the concept of truth—a bit like a smashed window, if you ask me. The variants are many and wildly uneven. And those “territories of semantic concern” that are and surround the shards aren’t inconsequential in the least—they’re the stuff that makes the ground for play! Facticities is a delicious word. Isn’t it a great, funny word? Apparently means the kind of facts that can be verified by some sort of record, which, of course, for me, growing up in a house of slippery truths, brings up additional issues of reliability, as well as liability to error in the act of recording.

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Jordan DeBor, features poetry by Jamie Quatro and art by Helen Brough.

Though “Prayer” uses the trope of natural disaster, I wrote the poem during a quiet, deeply private season of grief. Loss of any kind can feel, to the bereaved, as much an “act of God” as large-scale catastrophe. And certainly “acts of God,” both public and private, raise the classic existential question: if there is a “God of love” or a “Benevolent Spirit” behind the universe, why would he or she allow suffering and tragedy to exist (or have created a universe in which suffering had the potential to exist)? I suppose there are three responses: there is no such Spirit (atheism); or, if there is such a Spirit, s/he is either indifferent to human affairs (the Deist Prima Mobile) or unable to prevent suffering and evil (a sort of grandfatherly Benevolence, perpetually weeping); or else the Spirit behind all things is simply evil (unthinkable). To maintain belief in a wholly loving God who is powerful enough to prevent suffering but chooses to allow it for ultimately beneficent purposes beyond our present comprehension—this seems, to me, the supreme act of religious faith.
– Jaime Quatro

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Galina Arnaut, features poetry by Paula Brancato and art by Rebecca Loyche.

“Even the fireflies linger” in Paula Brancato’s poem “And Here and There, a Kiss”; and don’t we all wish that the summer months would linger on as well? This season’s end is upon us once again, and I find myself stubbornly grasping on before it slips away into fall. Though “And Here and There, a Kiss” is more than a poem about a season, it captures the simultaneous tragedy and magic of that simple, suburban summer. It speaks to that wistful youth of growing up and those carefree days that eventually slip away from us all.
– Galina Arnaut

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Jordan DeBor, features poetry by Rebecca Foust and art by Drew Leshko.

Where I’m from, substance abuse is a common way of dealing with pain, and it figures in this and in many of my poems. I was fortunate to land the scholarships to college and law school that gave me a way out of a life that did not seem to present many options, but what you experience as a child, of course, shapes your adult experience. My adult life brought another experience of fragmentation and fragility—raising a son with autism. Fragmentation and fragility—both his and my own—and coming back from that was the basis for my first collection of poems, Dark Card.
– Rebecca Foust

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Richard J. Goldstein, features poetry by Rosemarie Castoro and art by David Goodman.

Before I was aware of the news, I just had a good friend for tea, and he helped me bring some pictures out in the light. Little did we know, an unveiling of another kind was happening in California. Once I found out, I was dizzy as I ever was…the dizzy kid hovering over the red plastic record player watching the picture disc—Michael Jackson reclined in his white suit—spinning into oblivion’s blur. As Thriller played, Michael disappeared. As if it’s the only way to find our place again, we tend to never forget where we were during times of shock. Where were you when the news broke about Michael? Rosemarie Castoro’s poem “While Michael Lays Dying” records her sense of place and sense of self all the while the story and identity of Michael Jackson unravels. Gathering the pieces, David Goodman’s synecdochical portrait of Michael Jackson is a taxonomy of shattered masks, evolution, and decay. The death of Michael Jackson was not just a rupture to reality, but also a rupture to fantasy and dream.
– Richard Goldstein

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by BOMB intern Katherine Sanders, features poetry by Andrew Naymark and art by Mary Murphy.

Writing a letter these days seems to be a tribute to nostalgia rather than an efficient means of communication. I almost always choose to text or email rather than actually write or type a letter. But I decided to write a long letter to a friend after reading Andrew Naymark’s poem “Letter.” The poem taps into the transitory yet life-altering realm of this often forgotten art and reminds us that “some beauty has failed to be recognized” when we fail to send a letter.
– Katherine Sanders

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by BOMB intern Katherine Sanders, features poetry by Idra Novey and art by Laura Halsey Brown.

Vasko Popa’s “The Little Box” describes an empty space that grows to contain an entire world in miniature. Idra Novey builds on this idea in her series The Little Prison. Although the breathtaking first stanza of the first poem discusses punctuation, all the poems in this series are punctuation-free, giving the feeling that we are floating above and around this self-contained, almost irresistible world of curiosity. The entire series is forthcoming in the American Poetry Review in the fall.
– Katherine Sanders

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Lena Valencia, features poetry by Melissa Monroe and art by Nathan Heuer.

Melissa Monroe’s chillingly didactic “To Cross Safely Over Thin Ice” reads like a cross between an ex-soldier recounting a particularly horrific war memory and an instruction manual. As battle imagery and natural disaster collide in this incantation, Monroe executes precise control over everything from the language to the form of the poem, which resembles a slab of cracked ice.
– Lena Valencia

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice features poetry by Joseph P. Wood and art by Miriam Brummer.

Mid-phrase line and stanza breaks are just one way that Joseph Wood creates a feeling of moving through archaic symbols toward new life. Mixing alchemy and Christianity on the same poetic canvas, he presents the stunning image of reaching for what lies beyond the “shadowy borderline.”

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Galina Arnaut, features poetry by Craig Cotter and art by Millee Tibbs.

I find myself thinking lately a lot about nostalgia, and how memories always seem so much more favorable in retrospect. Perhaps this is why I liked “The Last Time” by Craig Cotter; it takes this nostalgia and juxtaposes it with that inevitable, crushing realization that we can never recreate that past. Or maybe it was just for its mention of landing strips, which always makes me laugh; as we grow older it seems anything can take on a sexual connotation.
– Galina Arnaut

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Mónica de la Torre, features poetry by James Capozzi and art by Harutaka Matsumoto.

I don’t fully understand the associative leaps in “A Poverty,” but since it’s dedicated to Raymond Queneau, co-founder of OuLiPo, I’m almost certain it was composed procedurally. What I’m about to say might be sacrilege to hardcore Oulipians who believe that the writing resulting from imposing elaborate constraints on yourself needs to justify the rules you’ve chosen to follow, but I particularly appreciate being in the dark as to what constraints generated the poem. It’s as if James Capozzi had made poverty vows and therefore deprived himself of the satisfaction he might derive from one-upmanship. I’m taken with the poem’s minimal scale, with the makeshift and almost rickety quality of its composition. The poem is barely there, and my understanding of it is, itself, pocked.
– Mónica de la Torre

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Himali Singh Soin, features poetry by Luke Woods and art by Soin.

When all we believe is thwarted and the only thing that is certain is uncertainty, we are left scaling shadows of illusory frames that contain vague lines of knowledge, limply stimulated. The poem reflects upon—with slight hyperbole—the sexuality of imprisonment and the stark numbness that follows when we are finally set free. The election in January left us simultaneously elated and mutilated, as our psyches began to fathom the future, the past. When time distorts, we are left “miming walls with fingers traced through space” . . .
– Himali Soin

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Lena Valencia, features poetry by Beverly Bie Brahic and art by Rubén Ortiz-Torres.

“CRSH” brings to mind the sexually horrific worlds of Ballard and Cronenberg in a handful of compact lines. Evoking a sense of disaster and claustrophobia in its abbreviated title, Brahic’s decidedly un-erotic description of intercourse and hint of some terrible accident meld the human and the mechanical figuratively and possibly literally as well.
– Lena Valencia

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Mónica de la Torre, features poetry by Adam Day and art by Ben Handzo.

I was instantly hooked by this poem’s catchy title. Its first three lines gently pulled me down a perhaps too-familiar path (or should I say aisle?) generally populated by rapt men contemplating the least erogenous of objects to members of the opposite sex: tools. The fourth and fifth lines were the clinchers. With the lightest of touches, “Guys Like Us” highlights the ludicrousness of gender-based clichés (think “men are from Mars”) and exposes the subliminal in all its fumbling awkwardness.
– Mónica de la Torre

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Richard J. Goldstein, features poetry by T. Zachary Cotler and art by Clare Stephenson.

The lines for and of Olivia run a curious parallel between T. Zachary Cotler’s poem and recent monumental silkscreen prints on wood by Clare Stephenson. This cross-current is best elucidated by an elusive presence streaming through both works . . . . A tenuous breeze curls through the space of Cotler’s Olivia as “the cold, nine-second ladder / in her spine,” perhaps the same chill that rustles the pages of the book, the same breeze lifting the skirts and wraps of Stephenson’s angels-cum-drag queens who teeter asymmetrically at high-heeled-heights. The decadence in both poem and print are rife with a sense of impending decay, literary and aesthetic, which prove to be too much for the characters. Olivia turns away; Stephenson’s troupe wavers flaunted and flawed. What shakes them is their connection to beauty, their reveling and revelation in it. Their responses picture an experience of beauty that attracts and repels.
– Richard J. Goldstein

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Lena Valencia, features poetry by Josiah Bancroft and art by Tara Milch.

Bancroft’s bizarre fable recalls the horrifically magical world of the Brothers Grimm while hinting at allegory. “Giant” is a poem about a society’s attempt to rid itself of its ills. It is both fantastic and eerily resonant in today’s political climate.
– Lena Valencia

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by BOMB intern Mary Dawn, features poetry by Aleš Šteger (translated by Brian Henry) and art by Kyle Green.

Brian Henry translates the darkly whimsical “Jelly,” from Slovenian poet Aleš Šteger’s 2005 volume, Knjiga reči (The Book of Things). This gruesome narrative chronicles the transformation of a city as its citizens become truly unified in one apocalyptic instant; spare, precise imagery vividly renders the surreal event.
– Mary Dawn

Read full article =>

BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by BOMB intern Brittnee King, features poetry by Megan Erickson and art by Scott Sandars.

It’s seeing and being seen, the civilized and the brute, the wild and the tamed all mixed together. Megan Erickson’s “Watching” is a poem that slithers around the idea of perception and judgment; it scans humans and human nature and puts every extreme on the same platter. It is a poem that travels through the lowly of human kind, up to the elite, and back again. It mixes messages, reverses our roles, and it blurs that line between filth and cleanliness, and poverty and wealth. “Watching,” in just a few lines, brings to light both unity and impenetrable segregation. I was impressed and captivated by Erickson’s subtle flow between watching another and watching one’s self—a transition we all must make from time to time.
– Brittnee King

Read full article =>