December 14, 2012

Posted on December 30, 2012 by thisfrenzy

December 14, 2012
Elliott batTzedek

How hard is it not to shoot a child?
How hard to raise up children who will not shoot
children? How hard not to sell exploding bullets and
assault rifles and video-game infomercials? How hard
not to pay for care for the lost and the broken and the crazy before
the SWAT teams and the counselors are called?

Easy, easy, so much easier
than blood that can never be cleared from a classroom, than
knowing “point-blank range” means children saw
his face and knew the hard stone bullets were coming.

A senior in high school when Lennon’s glasses were shattered,
my life since has seen murder after mass murder,
most with masculinity in common,
most with the un-mentionable race,
most with mental illness, too.

But all with guns and guns and guns and guns
and guns and guns and guns.

The tale of the accidentally all-women’s issue

Posted on October 9, 2012 by thisfrenzy

I have three pieces coming in the next issue of the small literary journal Armchair/Shotgun. It’s a young journal, this is only issue #3, but it’s already gotten great reviews. They have a “blind” admission process, which means each piece that comes in is given a number, and names aren’t attached again until the final pieces are chosen. For this issue, ALL of the contributors turned out to be women, in a literary world where women are consistently proportionally underpublished.

This is great news, and it’s gotten some amazing coverage. The first blog to pick this up was The Millions, and then The Atlantic Wire: An accidental all-female issue

Then the editors at Armchair/Shotgun wrote this great explanation of how the issue came about: Women’s Work. The whole essay is worth reading, but here’s a great excerpt:

Because as the VIDA count demonstrates each year, many more men than women get published in literary journals, reviews of books, and other lit-type magazines. More short stories by men, more reviews by men, and more male-authored books that get reviewed. The only category in which women tend to have the edge is poetry.

There are a lot of discussions about why this might be. One theory says that a lot more men than women submit their work–either because there are more male writers or because they are more aggressive at self-promotion. That’s certainly plausible. Could our all-female issue just have been a fluke of submitter demographics?–did vastly more women than men submit their work to us this time? Nope. When we looked back at all the submissions, we saw a lot more traditionally-male names there than female.

The women’s work was just better this time.

THEN a blogger at the Poetry Foundation picked up the story at Way to Go, Ladies!

Press! Press! Press! And the first piece in the issue is by Yours Truly. You can buy a copy online here Armchair/Shotgun

Armchair/Shotgun #3

NaPoMo – April 15 “Poppies”

Posted on April 15, 2012 by thisfrenzy

Poppies

From atop the cliff the sun
at a certain angle sets them
afire, pulsing light
hearts beating

theirs, and yours, and then
the light moves on, you blink
and they are shadowed

so don’t stop looking

hold your breath, feel the thumpa-thump
of that good muscle—and the instant becomes
as eternal as you risk making it

as you risk holding the sun in place
holding the cliff
holding time
so the petals go on with their blazing and neither the poppies
nor you, watching
nor me, writing you watching
nor the flashing in your brain for each word read
are consumed by the flames.

NaPoMo – April 8, “Grace”

Posted on April 9, 2012 by thisfrenzy

a re-imagining of a poem from last April.

Grace
for Alexine

Not divine, not rare, perhaps unexpected,
not unearned—our brightest courage

shone back at us. She learned to trust
by trusting this horse, hurtling together

over fences or walls or any obstacles.
When Rosie died, when she found

her own knees could not lift her
up from the rough floor, she found

hands, reaching for her. Friends
of Rosie, people who paused at the pasture

nearly every day, people
she’d never suspected now stopping

their cars, saying: I’m sorry, she was
so beautiful, my child loved her.

Grief thrusts a rigid basket
of bricks into our arms. Grace

stretches a stranger’s hand to pluck
some of them, to make bearable

the crippling bulk. Old wives tell
the truest tales—a shared load

is lighter, so light it shines,
a spring sun on an old mare,

now blind, who trusted this woman
once, to fly, and always, to find her way back.

NaPoMo April 7 – notes toward a poem

Posted on April 7, 2012 by thisfrenzy

and by “notes toward” I mean the ideas that may underlie a poem someday. I used to write just like this—have a deep-something-to-say, write it in short lines with rich language and be done. But that’s like scribbling some lyrics and claiming to have a song!

But poem-a-day is a difficult pace and often means “poem first draft a day.” Today’s poem first draft is historically based: on this date in 1927, the first city-to-city television broadcast occurred. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was in DC and his audience was in New York. After some moments of Profound Blather about the greatness of this tool, the real entertainment came on—a comedian in blackface. I think that the music of this poem wants to be a sonnet. Its got bits of rhythm going, and the internal turns and twists of a sonnet. We’ll see.

the transmission of sight, for the first time in the world’s history
(Herbert Hoover, opening statement of the first city-to-city television broadcast)

Proudly announced on the first television broadcast, D.C. to NYC
Directly after: a comedian in blackface
And so it goes
And so it’s gone ever since, blackface, womanface, childface,
redneck face, youcantrustmeface, with the transmission of sight
masks glued on, a new way to profit from prejudice so now
my country’s vicious idiocy can be spread
as capitalist-gospel truth
How I’d like to pretend language rises above that fray but
what language rises higher than billboards or blimps?
We make a new way to communicate, we make a new way to lie,
telling you a story and selling you a story just sweet
phonemic first cousins, truth a matter of road to hell,
good intentions, how arrogant we poets can be, complacently believing
we are somehow different from tv

NaPoMo April 6 – “Love Psalm”

Posted on April 6, 2012 by thisfrenzy

Love Psalm

in the form of quassams, flung over
our prison walls, slingshots of sugar and
fertilizer, rockets whistling our tune,
carrying the words of our song:

          We will come back, we will come back
          We have not forgotten you, Mother, Land
          to whom we know we belong

And when they touch you, having burrowed through
the cement that pretends to be your tombstone, they deliver
our sweet kisses, our lips to yours sealing
our oath:

          We have not forgotten you, Mother, Land
          that rises to meet our lips
          that will never agree
          to be exiled from us

You open yourself to us
You will swallow these houses on the day we post notice
of the date of our return

NaPoMo April 5th “you don’t believe in god, but”

Posted on April 6, 2012 by thisfrenzy

(Warning to casual blog readers – this is really explicit about violence against girls. Don’t read on if, right now, you just can’t go there)

you don’t believe in god, but

run down the hall
     dart in the room
          close the door
          block it with your whole body
run down the hall
     dart in the room
          close the door
          block it with your whole body
pray

not like it could’ve mattered he always opens the door
slowly
slowly so you can keep hoping you might be able to stop this so he
can drink in every subtle taste of your hope

not like he won’t let you go saying your litany of no no no no no an aperitif
so delicious he orders another: Quiet! If they hear you I’ll have to hurt them
which is so brilliant, really, such rhetorical concision, so few words
yet able to make you complicit and make you hope anyone who could hear
might care, then

Oh, go ahead. Yell all ya want. Everyone knows I’m here.

Has anyone stupid ever become a truly successful sadist?

Then he reaches around the door, grabs your arm, just like scene 4
of every slasher movie (need you ask where they get
their formula?) and you (the babysitter who was dreaming of kissing,
the head cheerleader, the loose girl, the bookish girl with glasses, the jock,
the any-other-stereotype of a girl who has it coming) feel your green
and growing bones compress, your shoulder wrench and you go
(     )
(     )
(          )

you don’t believe in god but somehow
you grew up and you’ve never done this to a child, never fucked,
never mind-fucked, never lied, never twisted or broken, never fed
from hope or pain, never dislocated an arm
or a soul and how
outside of some supernatural
compassion can you account for how you get to live each day knowing
you’ll never have to account?

NaPoMo April 3rd – “an infinity of outcomes”

Posted on April 3, 2012 by thisfrenzy

an infinity of outcomes
Elliott batTzedek

such fragility in stone if
atoms began to unbond themselves my house
would be dust or even mystery for a future Ph.D.
dung heap missing walls, stone
having become gas

and if our planet’s protons, depressed by the state of
things, go all negative on us we might
find ourselves water or copper or
toolittletoolate-amonium

a change so small you can barely
understand it, knowledge dissolving into
chaos of no-longer-theoretical-physics
probability disintegrating into
pray lib obit or baby lip riot or pitiably orb

anything, in short, could so easily be anything
else and yet you lie by me quivering
cells controlled by some unknown, alien, invader bent
on making your nerves set themselves ablaze, a burning
doctors cannot name so cannot help so I

am again up late looking for healers: psychics, palm readers,
proctors of past lives, providers of snake skins or bee balm,
re-birthers, re-energizers, the energizer bunny, particle physicists,
particle board, anything that might be
an answer or that at the very least will not stare past us proclaiming
Some people learn to live like this
for in a universe of infinite realities this can’t go on being real:
you lying there, like that
me watching you, like this

March 28th 2012

Posted on March 29, 2012 by thisfrenzy

If you really know me, you’ll know
that I could quite possibly sing sections of “Sources”
to that three-finger-picked high melody soaring up Foggy Mountain.

On days like this I know what Adrienne meant
by “split at the root,” I know, because she taught me to know,
that everything that lies stored in us
is the source of our strength and that
the horrible place that opens in our center
when we are so split
is where poetry
grows in that most uncomfortable
most quickening
womb.

This Frenzy

this frenzy / like bees stinging the heart all morning Anne Sexton

Tag Archives: my poems

December 14, 2012

The tale of the accidentally all-women’s issue

NaPoMo – April 15 “Poppies”

NaPoMo – April 8, “Grace”

NaPoMo April 7 – notes toward a poem

NaPoMo April 6 – “Love Psalm”

NaPoMo April 5th “you don’t believe in god, but”

NaPoMo April 3rd – “an infinity of outcomes”

March 28th 2012

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