SEXIEST POEM OF 2008 is Anne Waldman and Akilah Oliver's collaborative CD MATCHING HALF

SOMETHING FOR YOURSELF OR SOMEONE YOU LOVE WHO LOVES POETRY AND AMAZING MUSIC, JUST IN TIME FOR holiday stupidity, which is why this CD is important, confronting stupidity.

If you haven't heard the CD MATCHING HALF by Waldman and Oliver (with Ambrose Bye's music), then you haven't heard anything like this, I guarantee you! The political as FIERCE poem as FIERCEST song of 2008! Although I've seen Anne Waldman perform many times over the years, HER VOICE -- have you heard her SING? -- I mean, she can REALLY SING, not just one of the most memorable reading voices of our time! The poem/song "TO SHOW MY FACE" on the CD gives us the incredible and powerful range she possesses in her voice. YOU TOO will be listening to this CD over and over and over! "Not Cleopatra's face, not Emperor Hirahito's face, not an Agrippa at the control, not the face of a tyrant or a super errant knight."

FINALLY, poetry/music that's amazing as poems as much as they are as music! I feel like I've been waiting for this CD my whole life!

The poem/song "CORSET" by Anne Waldman is dedicated to the great Emma Goldman, and the poem/song becomes a very large finger circling around the lives of hard working, sweating factory women, the finger moving DIRECTLY into the center of the circle of the story, to the fascist center, the dark axis.


An excerpt of "CORSET (for Emma Goldman)":

I'll call: arise! and would cast in a daily sweat of labor a struggle a sweet edge that way for it's an energy of daily sweat and toil to be free of the fascisms of how and when and why and why o never free of J. Edgar Hoover but my imagination ever free of the imagination of J. Edgar Hoover who will certainly most certainly have your number in his fractious labor and psychopathic toil even now when he the ghost of fractious J. Edgar Hoover is stalking haunting the work places the meeting places the "commune" of all my sweat and purpose. What is it to be a large woman be-speckled and intent in my libertarian socialist moment you want to call it that why you can call it that and it's so much more but do call it that and you will I'm sure call it that and most dangerous of violence and terror to incite a riot.


"It's Sunday. What happened to Saturday.
As soon named as soon strangeness of living
As soon named as soon strangeness of living"
Track 10 is Akilah Oliver's poem/song "STRANGENESS OF LIVING." Here is where you feel a poet who has taken a long road, nothing taken for granted, nothing left unexamined, no pain that needed to be felt left unfelt. It's a harbor for the world to feel completely alone together. Love is the very last thing taken for granted though, and it's important to understand that, for the poet, for the poem, and for the reader. This is political in the best sense, meaning a political letting NOTHING and NO ONE fuck around with the borders where we need to breathe the clean air. You'll be hearing from her if you do fuck around. Or, as she says in the poem/song, "In other words, leave me alone motherfuckas cause I'm in a position of trust and responsibility then besides, I can't afford to be off my ass." You can hardly believe how much this CD builds, and then you get to THIS poem/song! Here's an amazing excerpt, but when you buy the CD (you really will want this CD, so just shut up and buy it!), you'll get the full impact:

spitting out "prophecy" as if it were bad grammar, back in those goblin days before T spelled out in Oakland, before i had expanded my vocabulary: decedent, aporia, Sheol, elegiac, switchblade.
Spruce is a street to go down. to go down. to look for. so impossible. Anne sends a quotation in the midst of words i wanted: in this impossible break of a single line "had beautiful teeth", "had beautiful teeth", i break while inventing Kentucky bluegrass and alcoholism.
[who knew what a bestseller either of these would be? i'm laughing "all the way to the bank" [as they say] yeah yeah yeah how come you want to treat my baby so bad, how come you want to treat me so bad, baby? good to you,
have i been?
good, to be
Good. To be unknown
To be broken to be
Sentry to be just to
Be good earth I've been back back been back many times been been back here good earth I've been back back many times been back been back here

THIS CD WAS PUT OUT BY GARY PARRISH'S FARFALLA PRESS AND FAST SPEAKING MUSIC AND IF YOU SHOOT PARRISH AN E-MAIL farfallapress@gmail.com HE'LL SELL YOU A COPY. MAKE THE EFFORT, NOT MUCH OF AN EFFORT AT ALL, JUST E-MAIL HIM, YOU NEED THIS.

SEXIEST POEM OF 2007 is President of the United Hearts' THE BIG MELT

My new friend Rinku just told me today in an e-mail, "You are only the 2nd American I have met since my arrival here in May 2007 who has expressed anger and sorrow at the massacre of the Iraqis in an illegitimate war." How is that possible? Really? But I know it is possible, easily possible. Iraq War veteran Agustin Aguayo spoke in Philadelphia last year at the Quaker Meeting Center about the large number of Iraq War veterans who come home to the US after their tour of duty, only to move to Germany soon after, marry German women, and denounce their US citizenship out of anger at the LEVEL of denial in our country for Iraq. If that information does not fully enter the American Soul, what will? With this war it is our soldiers who are becoming expatriates, not just the hippie poets. Raise your children with that bit of American history, as I'm sure their school books will forget to mention it.

Without a doubt THE BIG MELT afflicted all my senses in 2007 as only the best poetry will do. Written by President of the United Hearts, this book is relentlessly directed at all we wish to deny. READ THIS:


Gentlemen, I think it will get darker
Before it gets lighter, is my nose bleeding?
Undeniably dead but attractive
We'll get it right this time, won't we?
Do we have to go in? [Expletive]
Forests stink of the failure -- what country
(Is it his?) Guarantees complete
Excretions that moisten that
Potential or incomprehensibility
Nature produces comparable to
An invasion that cannot be
Its scheduled no-show disregard.
It's impossible to be an artist
The point of deception
Complete control, pretending control
An attentive eye, the open ear
allegory heavier than rock
Lynndie England and her leash
Go blindly to disaster
Clamped to his genitals
The giant ice shelf splits asunder
"People scare better when they're dying"
This society's crazed
Covered with straps they could not
Stand being free
In the vernacular of the peasantry
Society's unmitigated hate
Looks like a "whopper"
Isolates matrixes gummy 'eligibility'
Inadequately equipped environs
[A persistence of catastrophe]
Build up and never evaporate
Undeniably and reliably
The human body will be an event
This is your cake, and this is your crown
You can go anywhere
The final resting place
The painted ink in the editorial:
We killed each other
In bursts of mud


This is not only excellent writing, it's a poetry with a massive embrace on the problems in front of us, around us, deeply within us. It's not seeing a chain of events but a web of, an undeniably accurate web of, connecting every single action to its resulting deprivation, as accurate as any smart bomb, hopefully even smarter.

The FORWARD of the book is, beautiful to say, at the end of the book! Here is a bit of that FORWARD to get you understanding something about THE BIG MELT as well as President of the United Hearts:


The Big Melt is a collective's assembled response in verse to the 2004 U.S. Presidential election and its aftermath, i.e. the continuing elision and transfer of legislative power to the executive branch (that vast monument of fatuity leaning toward the future like the Tower of Pisa, in which nothing less than the happiness of humankind is being worked out) in every public sector, government, finance, educational, and cultural. That said, it has been mentioned with a measure of confidentiality that I intend to honor that President of the United Hearts (hereafter, PUH, pronounced pooh; a pleasant enough alternative to PUS) is a collective absent the flesh and blood members needed to sustain collaborative endeavors of whatever kind. Be that as it may, PUH's message, urgent and indispensable, is one of gravitas and moral outrage -- it is against the radical right and the misguided timidity of progressives. Further, the work generated within its membership comes from its source, the heartland, the opening zero, the Midwest -- the void it is roomy to lie in. In action against the philosophy of myself, I, the correspondences between PUH's eyes, mouths and ears, however arrayed, pushes what is ours upon ourselves, cultivates its promise in our hearts -- no measuring its innermost play. As voiced by Medea, "but I was rendered speechless / and from there nothing but pain." PUH is capable of taking the abyss of its own communicability upon itself and of exposing it without fear or complacency. Its promise is a bold move to which the reader no longer viewing life from behind the screen of her ego but able to see things in the human world's return (nostos) to splendor willingly succumbs.


If I could afford a thousand copies of one book from 2007 to hand out freely, it would be THE BIG MELT. And 2007 was a year of many terrific books! Factory School published THE BIG MELT, and you can order it HERE or HERE.

CAConrad

SEXIEST POEM OF 2006 is Jules Boykoff's "Commandment #8"

(photo by Brendan Lorber)

Anyone in search of a finely crafted poem demonstrating a fearlessness which confronts injustice will have no option but to turn to Jules Boykoff, hopefully sooner than later.


(a short excerpt from)
Commandment #8

.

it all began with "awash in petrodollars" waiting at the penned trigger where thirsty cotton hovered thirstily between the never-been-done-before & the-way-it's-always-been

a much warmer regime of Sputnik-driven cool-hunters putting [mis]treated wood into the [mis]fire

.

a focus group waiting to be focused

a full stopped narco-flower-vendor multiplex tribunal waiting to be big-boxed

a micro-thrillabilly lava lamp on fire in the middle of the sales pitch

velocity money stuck with a bus transfer to cartelized humdrum

.

commandment #2 being covet thy seed & genes as thy like-minded meth lab [skunk-scuttle skunk-scuttle]

the novelty of the liquidity of water

now square it

.

A 'good historian' is someone good historians call a good historian

.

commandment #3 being don't covet thy neighbor's spiritual connections with his powerful icon for capitalism or thou shall besmirch thy cattle-tonic glum hopper with unnecessarily forlorn animosity

.

aggressive bedazzlement

anticipatory tenement

indisputably disputable

.

white

man's

wheelbarrow

(read the full poem in the book Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (EDGE BOOKS, 2006))

Too often these days in the various "experimental" poetry scenes I hear some poets saying, "I don't like poetry with overt political content." Over and over it's said, and said with an assertive tone making me squint, pinch a good squint. Pushing to question the statement seems to go nowhere, which makes me suspicious for several reasons.

Suspicious that this statement is said with such similar pose that it's part of a vernacular, uh, somewhere in the poetry world I believe where it's unfolding for a few. But that pushing to question the statement goes nowhere because, maybe, the origin of it's meaning is unknown to many who mimic the words? It's so hip, so it seems.

That, or, that no one WANTS to retrace the steps for fear of some kind of reprisal?

But what would that reprisal be I ask? It's a rebellious pitch, no doubt, said with such conviction, but why, exactly, and from where, exactly?

It could simply be that these poets are MISSING the brilliance of poetry by, well, Jules Boykoff for instance!

Or, are these deeper, more hidden issues of class and privilege that so many poets seem so adept these days at dancing around and far, far away from when brought up?

While it's a hip and trendy thing to say these days, don't mind me saying "I DON'T FUCKING MIND SOME OVERT POLITICAL CONTENT IN POEMS!" In fact, turning directly toward Jules Boykoff is turning directly to poems few can mould with such affection to be political, universally political. He's got a hold of worlds.

"Commandment #8" is a marvelous example of Jules Boykoff having some of the sharpest edges of the living poem we have. Can be seen. Felt. He is NEVER shy about our feelings coming forward. "Commandment #8" is a milk-filled tit we can all get a hold of, for nourishment for our much needed immunity against fear. Drink that milk! And thank you Jules Boykoff for honest, brave poems! We need these more than ever!

SEXIEST POEM OF 2005 is Carol Mirakove's "Mediated"

Carol Mirakove is a poet who blows me away on a regular basis. If you STILL haven't read her book OCCUPIED, well, I just have no idea what's keeping you! GET IT! DAMMIT! It's the kind of book you tell friends about, you'll see.

MEDIATED is a poem she read at the inaugural reading of the NIGHT FLAG series in Philadelphia, coordinated by Frank Sherlock. The place was packed, she stood in the frame of the poppy red that separates the stage and the seating.

"Wow! What is this POEM!?" I remember thinking as one of the first lines signals through the smoky room, "[Subject] awake awake psychographic? [End of Message]" we're quiet, with this, listening tight, "Headline: "No Matter How Much Energy We Conserve, We're Still Going to Need More Energy" - President Bush, May 18, 2001(Continued)"

She had us!

Headline: US Warns Hugo Chavez Labeled OPEC Lunatic
(Continued)

[Subject] rock smash scissors [End of Message]

Headline: Prosecutor in Coup Case Assassinated (Continued)

Headline: Poppy Crop Fire Scare Again Tops Economic Charts
(Continued)

[Subject] makes a bedspread & is so taken by the colors & patterns
of the bedspread she only vaguely sees the other objects in the
room - she only sees a fragment of the whole. this happens
because she is, we are, conditioned to - and have deep biological
needs towards - pleasure. [End of Message]

Headline: NAFTA, CAFTA, & the Poverty After (Continued)

Headline: Lula Dubbed Cardoso II, May Yet Have Tricks Up Sleeve
[One Hopes] (Continued)

[Subject] in my bed we are sleeping in the dreaming/nightmare
beds we make [End of Message]

Headline: Boom Hum Factors Mexico's Border, Crosses
Disillusioned (Continued)

Her way of weaving delicate balances of a personal place in the web of national to international is beautiful, but especially helpful, in that we suddenly appear in this world with her as complicit, as hopeful, as certain of Love. Carol Mirakove's "MEDIATED" is a pointer in these ways, and guides the hand over the globe to better investigate the likes of revolutions in Venezuela and Bolivia, and she states, "they won we could be / winning"

WE CAN BE WINNING! Winning what? It's as she writes, "freedom / for / your / freedom !"
OH YEAH! I LOVE THAT LINE WHEN IT ARRIVES!

If you get the chance to hear her read "MEDIATED" don't give up that chance. THE FACTORY SCHOOL will be publishing it soon in book form, stay tuned for that, sometime in the Spring I believe. And because they are giving such effort, money, etc., I won't publish the poem here for you. Sorry, but we need to support small presses.

But here's another short excerpt:

[ticker] billboard aura, anybone, we are the you in future. a rush at
the bar looks justified. does he have a pet, or a bed, I couldn't hear?
[ticker] the pulls while kids twirl flutes & louts before a fireplace,
eyes, rolled back not out – so as to stand a presence.

let’s get abducted. car seat in the woods, rock horse in the desert &
some tumble. is there noise? yes there is big noise and mind you
even bigger ears. we tall & tangent shadows.

there are five of them & form a rhombus little constellation. & we go
with "them," we go with any "them"s, with all the time in the
world.

let's have all the time in the world.

& not worry that that makes no sense our blazen melee
megaphones. & not worry that all the time in the world might be, in
fact, ecologically brief.

not worry

Keep your attentions to THE FACTORY SCHOOL for the publication of "MEDIATED."
CAConrad

SEXIEST POEM OF 2004 is Charles Bernstein's "Ballad of the Girlie Man"

(many of these notes below were orignally written on 01/04/05 -- in other words, 4 days before Elvis's birthday)

Mr. Bernstein's badass winning poem appears online at MILK MAG. (And is also now the title poem to his amazing new book!)

If I were giving out separate awards for poem and reading of poem, then Mr. Bernstein would have to win both!

When reading the poem in Philadelphia for the 2004 MLA conference he dedicated its reading to the memories of Gil Ott and Jackson Mac Low.

In New York at St. Mark's Poetry Project's 2005 New Years benefit reading he dedicated the reading of the poem to the memory of Jackson Mac Low.

Both times, as a listener, I dedicated my ears to let it be heard and told to the living, everywhere!

If Mr. Bernstein never inspired you ever before, you would not be able to say so after hearing this poem, I guarantee you!

And I wish (like all wishing idiots) that I could have had the MANY fools who know nothing about Language Poetry but claim to know it well and claim to hate it---I wish they could have heard what I heard!

Talking this evening with my friend Matt McGoldrick, he and I agreed that the reading in Philadelphia had much more punch and excitement, a much stronger delivery.

CAConrad