Publication; after Artie Gold


In a sense

it is the conflicted desire of each progressive white liberal and that unpublished thought isn’t death

but a fence.

something         greener          grows somewhere,
you see                there are things iconic
taunting our composition, those spider fingers taking on life of their own, poking six time zones and growing nails larger than the corpses we’ll leave. the abjection is each white splurge of a page, growing larger through the magic agency of blank stares at blank pages worrying each black letter will grow into a likeness of our genitals traced with our non-dominant hand. there’s so much corporeal we can keep it all. my friends say: CJ, what do these scribbles mean?


Questions and Answers

A.iii.

Recently I have been using UbuWeb and PennSound as resources to expand my knowledge of sound and visual poetry. Reading broadly is usually beneficial to a poet’s craft, and I would include listening to sound poetry as a necessary component to reading broadly.

B.i.

This poem is a rip-off. This poem is wearing influence on its sleeve. When you read something beautiful, you carry it with you for a while, right? It shows up in your poetry for a while. How much of an old poem can appear in a new poem without slipping into plagiarism? These questions and statements and ideas motivated me to write this poem.


This poem “Publication; after Artie Gold” originally appeared in Rescaling CanLit: Global Readings Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 238 (2019): 29.

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