29

STATEMENT FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Are there contradictions in my poetics?
There’s a boardwalk
Closed-up t-shirt stores, miniature golf,
Arcades, taffy and pizza,
And I am compulsively
And barefoot going from phone booth to phone booth
Looking for quarters and
On the basis of that I can claim
When I have a little change in my pocket
To be inspired. This is so long before I’m
Wondering whether I can change
Situations of my own choosing
I am so far from reading Our Inner Conflicts
I think Rotation of Crops is agronomy
But Kierkegaard is international and trump
And trap and I am happy
To discover the concept of a ‘tab’
At the bookstore down the street
As years later I think, yes, rush towards
Love withdraw all at once
This fight flight and sing all at once
Like Lee Ann singing the alphabet backwards
It’s not witchcraft it’s
Standard George Washington Bridge levitation
Kenneth get-out-of-townism
And not fade away oh
When your day care and your real estate broker
Have practically the same phone number
You can be grateful to have flunked out of Catholicism
Two or three generations previously
And therefore be native to the celesta
The sister
The flying tackle by Brown and Bard graduates
Uniformly aware of the limits on laughter
The imaginative possibilities of competition
Which even now is making
Whores shiver in the rain
It’s so difficult to feel for Bill Ford
We find ourselves in Copenhagen
Rhymes with New Haven
With cash in our pants and hearts
While any understanding is a contradiction a contraction
Of the wish to be experiencing
Without crud in the carburetor or Morty Feldman
Lost on Wall Street where the Germans mill
Around the shoulders of the SUVs on the diagonal
Or on the Ninth the hatchbacks with NYU stickers patrol
Which way to Ground Zero?
I feel a compulsion not to lose my balance
And a wish to knock everybody else down
A standing order for enthusiasms and
Weekend duty among the Reserved
Above all a need to oppose oppose oppose
For example, what do you mean, “poetics”?
Is that what you call the homunculus or robot
Who writes the poems of people in Poetics programs?
Is it the sum of attitudes anyone has toward a blank page
Or an unindentured hour
Or rather the quotient the point traveling
Over the surface of the egg feels moving from
Sephora to Toys ‘R’ Us to Virgin
And then out and really free in the objects
Pushed up against the ocean
So oblivious to the difference between anything and smoke.
If that’s one then no there are no contradictions in mine,
Only unrevealed evenings out across time.