The Rumpus.net » Ariana Reines

“Not since Sylvia Plath…

Lisa Dusenbery — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 20:30:52 +0000

…has a poet indulged an orgy of self-speculation of these proportions.”

At The Boston Review, B.K. Fischer takes a close look at Rumpus contributor Ariana Reines’ poetry of the erotic sublime, focusing on her two recent collections, Cœur de Lion and Mercury. Fischer draws out Reines’ recurring exploration of the “fundamental sources” of grief, and celebrates her “theoretical chops.”

Love Under Empire

Lisa Dusenbery — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 22:25:51 +0000

Triple Canopy excerpts Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, translated by Ariana Reines. The book, originally published in France in 1999, is out this month from Semiotext(e).

“The Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not even female. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating social totality.”

(Via Bookslut)

Liz Axelrod: The Last Book (of Poems) I Loved, Coeur de Lion

Liz Axelrod — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:37:36 +0000

Ariana Reines’ Coeur De Lion makes me want to drink and have sex. Not frilly drinks but hard strong liquor, and not just any sex, but the stuff of human explosions. Her poems, woven and connected from beginning to end, offer up an altar full of lustful interactions—classroom, bathroom, hotel and tree-hugging encounters, and the push-pull of an affair doomed to end in flames.

When we were in the mountains
We straddled a big fallen tree
I was so happy

I love these words! The poems sit sparse on the page, progressing as a tight narrative. I put Ms. Reyes in my cannon of love/lust poets like Deborah Landau and The Last Usable Hour, with her sexy wanderings through the city late at night, and Sandra Cisneros, whose Loose Woman makes me cry out for someone to spoon and swoon with.

Coeur De Lion’s beauty is in its sparse and tight language. There are few twists or clever turns of phrases, each line is hard flesh exposed for all its veins and glory. It’s in your mouth, and you will be satisfied with the finish:

My heart was beating
We went into the stall
And you slammed me against the wall
And everything was possible

The narrator and her lover/comrade are both writers. We live through their passion, their triangles and the circles of their small, close-knit literary worlds. Their story begins with holding hands in class and ends with borrowed books. It travels from the classroom to hotel rooms, and sadly, online, where words eventually kill the lovers.

The morning after
I definitively ruined
Our relationship
You wrote to me…
Fuck
You Ariana! For making believe,
For being too proud. For reading
Too deeply into words, so much
So that their meaning forms
Into nothing but your insecurities.

I feel the need to confess that I absolutely ruined a relationship in this very same manner. As a poet I read way too much into words, and my insecurities, while maybe not so visible on the surface, burn and rage down deep in me. I was with Ariana and her lover from the beginning to end. After the first reading of Coeur de Lion I opened a bottle of tequila and did shots in honor of Ariana Reines and the powerful magnetic pull of her naked pages filled with sex and bravery.

Leanna Moxley: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, The Cow

Leanna Moxley — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:55:17 +0000

I’ve been told that it’s harder to make friends once you are an adult because in order to be close to someone you have to be vulnerable.

I was told this as though it is impossible for mature adults to be vulnerable. We just don’t do that. It’s not allowed. And that really, truly, made me sad. The idea is that you have to put away your inner turmoiled feelings and keep them to yourself in order to be the right kind of person. That disturbs me.

And that’s why the last book I loved was The Cow, a book of poetry by Ariana Reines. I loved how strongly the poems seem to run in the opposite direction of what we’re told is “good writing,” and good being-an-adult, for that matter. In an article she wrote about her book, Reines said that she wanted to “write poems that an educated person would feel embarrassed to read, poems that sound like Goth girls with feelings.” I think that’s kind of an awesome idea. There’s this opposing idea right now (or maybe always), that the sorts of emotions felt by teenage girls are not real emotions. They don’t count. In fact, we discount many expressions of emotion, ones that seem too strong, or too messy, or too lurid and cliché. If somebody writes about emotions in that way, we say it is bad writing. We cringe, we are embarrassed, we turn away from it. But why should we?

What’s so great about The Cow is that it is full of shit. Literally. It is full of grotesque, messy physical descriptions of the slaughtering of cows. It is also full of grotesque, messy descriptions of human bodies, and of human emotions. And it’s also beautifully and lyrically written. There’s a line in the poem “Rendered” that says, “Where is a living thing not itself. Is her shit any less her?” And guess what: women shit, and they sweat, and they smell bad, and they have emotions that are messy and uncomfortable. I know that’s part of being me. It’s part of what living is.

And here’s the thing: it’s ok for men to be physically gross. They can fart and they can be fat and hairy and it’s okay. Right now it’s not okay for women to do and be those things, but I think it could become okay. That’s because almost anything that is typically seen as masculine can be accepted and thought of as the correct mode for all people. It’s not the same for feminine things. I think we’re still a long way from accepting the messy, gross emotions that people have. And that’s because emotions belong to teenage girls. They’re feminine. They’re weak. We distrust them.

This probably matters to me so much right now because I’m struggling to become a writer myself, and to understand what that means, and how I should do it. And at the same time, I’m in a new city struggling with making new friends and learning how to get close to people all over again. I feel a little bit like my experience is negated by the vast pantheon of serious male authors whose works I’m making my way through. I’ve read a lot of current literature, and I like a lot of it, too. There are just some parts of myself that I don’t see there.

But in The Cow Reines pulls all of these rejected things back into the picture. We have to wallow in shit and wallow in feelings. It’s a gorgeous, sensual experience, meaning that you feel the poems in your body. Your senses are engaged. But it’s not pretty, and it’s not delicate. It’s feminine in a different way, in a dirty, honest way. It makes me want to make a new best friend. Somebody who can talk shit with me. Somebody I can show my vulnerable underbelly to, and maybe they’ll show me theirs back.

Permanent Water

Ariana Reines — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:55:29 +0000

You just texted me two cock pics
It used to be more artful
The way you did it, the composition.
Like last week. It just stopped raining.
I have a cold quicksilver feeling.
I could put this in a place where you could find it
But I am hiding it here.

One time
I wanted you to call me
So I held my blackberry to my forehead.

Why am I so stupid. Do you know why? World,
Nothing could possibly be said of you that wouldn’t
Be true. Sometimes I think about the internet
And what it means to be ugly and my fantasy
Of transparency like a see-through Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. Transparency, gift
Of love that would be an ultimate, total greatness
When I look into the smooth floes

When you tell me
You love me
And I have
To believe you.
You’re gonna
Get sick of me
You said, standing
On my bed.
All that is said
Just because
It is said
In a climate
Oppressive
In its equivalencies
Is not so little
To be only
The equal
Of itself
I say
To myself.

I went to a store to return some shoes I bought on a day I felt confused.
I exchanged them for some cheaper ones that made me feel
Like a new woman even though the store
Made me feel like dying and I should know
Better and I do know better
But still. If there were nothing
But the slightest aspiration in my flesh toward a heaven
I would love you people just the way you are.
Instead I will dress up like a woman of a certain type
For you.
I don’t want your love or to be good
To you at all and I don’t want to feel
The way you are.

I read the sonnets
Of Shakespeare today. Not all of them are great.
It made me wonder what it was like at night
For him, or Isaac Newton or whoever he was
Or they were, but the name of him. I sort
Of think either he wrote them all drunk
And one in every fifteen or twenty was great
Just effortlessly, or he was in some kind of sick
Brooding obsession with his own ugliness
Wishing he could just look beautiful and not have
To say so in the light of his man, whom he nags
In more ways than one to make babies.
The permanent decreptitude of authors
Dying on the breast of fugitive beauty is a subject
I shall not transubstantiate. Basically it’s too
Gay for me. Maybe not. I bore
A hole in myself at the thought of my lord you.
Go with me. Drag me down
To your level, just do it. Try. If we ever get there I swear
To you I’ll be faithful

All Narration Just Congeals

T Fleischmann — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:00:04 +0000

Cœur de Lion is a lyric book, a book about being in love with someone you can’t have, and it unflinchingly acknowledges that the person she falls for is kind of awful.

Fence Books is rereleasing the previously out-of-print, book-length love poem, Cœur de Lion by Ariana Reines. (It was first printed by the small press Mal-O-Mar in 2007.) Reines selected the cover image, a lion, from a package of cheese. It is an angry, flailing lion, rendered in black lines with the only color in its red mouth and red crotch. The lion looks you in the eye and is a perfect mascot for this weird and weirdly moving book.

Reines’s first book, The Cow, came out in 2006, also from Fence Books. It is an explosive and confrontational text, both rude and beautiful, with giant stylistic leaps and risks. In contrast, Cœur de Lion is written in tight, conversational lines. It rarely alters form, instead flowing in relatively unbroken stanzas. The lines are so conversational they risk coming across as naïve. The book begins,

The other night
When I couldn’t sleep
Next to you and I
Said I wanted to cry
And you said I should
And I looked down and breathed
And then I did cry

These lines could be read as unfashionably confessional, plain in their emotions. And this is certainly one of the risks Reines takes, and also one of the reasons it is so engaging when she directs these exposed emotions into something so complicated, raw, and fucked up.

At the heart of the book is the story of an affair between Reines and a man named Jake. The poem directly addresses Jake, the “you” ubiquitous throughout. Reines fell in love with him even though he seems to be an emotional idiot (“It bothers me / That you cut out /American Apparel advertisements / And tape them to your bedroom wall”). It is a lyric book, a book about being in love with someone you can’t have, and it unflinchingly acknowledges that the person she falls for is kind of awful. Not that Reines lets herself off the hook easily—she is addressing him after breaking into his email and reading his correspondence with another woman, a woman to whom she later emails to share that Jake is a bad writer and that she enjoyed fucking him. Messy and risky, a lion with red in its mouth and its crotch, yet still a lyric of love.

While Reines cycles through her monologue to Jake, she manages to cover an amazing range of topics. She moves with the ease of conversation to new ideas, to Nabokov and Emma Bovary and to her and Jake’s mutual friends, their sex, and his pitiful novel Mein Cock. It is all tied together through the fact of its address to Jake, although that address itself isn’t simple or easy. As she says,

A speaker
Should have to pass
Through everything in the world
In order to dare
To dare
To say You

It is not a simple task, poetic address, and Reines isn’t interested in letting herself off lightly. To love someone, to capture one in a lyric, is to take advantage of them, even if the speaker is being taken advantage of herself in the process.

Perhaps the most striking departure away from direct consideration of the affair comes in a long section toward the end when Reines speaks of her mother (who has appeared earlier, if only briefly). The language here is more fractured and weird than most other places, Reines in a frenzy. It is the section most reminiscent of The Cow in subject and in voice. After giving some narration of the mother’s life (once successful, now poor and alone, visually characterized by “the oblong flame of my mommy’s orange wig”), Reines considers her relation to her mother, giving some insight into the connecting thread of the book.

This is my poem. I wish I wasn’t so
Lonely in this capability of being devastated by
Her. I wish I wasn’t alone in this
Awe of her long errand, even now as it starts
To get dumb, and how unloved
She is, and how broke, opening onto an expanse
Of losses so diverse and endlessly amplifiable
That all narration just congeals.

In an interview with the blog Thomas Moronic Reines said she likes “bad writing,” that “sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which’s something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.” Cœur de Lion, beautiful and thrilling and wrenching, is filled with the best of this bad writing, the embarrassing confessions and grim details and unfortunate emotions of life. It lays all of this out in a love poem, lyric in every sense of the word, and in its bareness it is a total success. Toward the end of the book, attempting to make sense of her attraction to Jake despite everything, she notes that it is “rare, to undertake an act / That’s truly free, and not just a response / To a confused surge of drives and fears.” How exhaustingly wonderful to have Reines’s own confused surge spill forth in this unforgettable book.

National Poetry Month, Day 29: “I’m a Poet and I Don’t Know It” by Ariana Reines

Rumpus Original Poems — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 08:00:45 +0000

I’m a Poet and I Don’t Know It

I am so broke
Maybe I am a poet
I wonder.

I eat three bowls of cereal in a row
I only eat cereal when I am broke
When I am really broke I don’t eat anything
I eat pills or nothing
Maybe I am a poet

Sometimes a wealthy woman gives me money because I am a poet
A great one, she says, and that I deserve it
The money.
Money and deserving it
Are a subject in American poetry.
Right now I feel like a poet.

I want to have sex with somebody
But I just can’t.
I am a poet

Then I have sex with somebody because I’m a poet
So what if I look like a chipmunk if I look like sex
I’m a poet and I know how to do it.
It is a narrow way to say something, saying ‘I’m a poet.’

I am this I am that I am not the other thing.
It is boring to say ‘fucking.’
I’ve had enough of it.

I can smell my friend’s pot but I’m not smoking it.
I’m writing this poem because I’m a poet.
When I’m broke my soul stands outside my face in a parody
Of the way my soul bursts outside of my face when I’m in love.
Knowing what it feels like to have nothing is part of being a poet
Though alone it is nothing. You know it.

When a man says to me, I’m a nomad, and I look at the gold chain
Bright against his brown chest, and he says, I’m from the Bronx,
I’m a caricature
I’m Italian and I wear a medallion, I smile because I’m a poet.

I’m Muhammad Ali over here, and you know it
Accept no substitutions, you can be it without knowing it,
I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
When I die
Give birth to me in your mind
Look
Let’s just be poets.
It’s high time you
Quit your job
And while you’re at it
Stop calling your mom, drop out of school
Bills are not to be paid by you.
Walk on the world and know it.
You can be that and even show it.
Put out your hand and watch the sky jizz into it.
You’re a poet.
So you feel sad? Row it
Halfway across the world.
It is time for you to open the doors of your houses
It is time for you to stop thinking about fashion
It is time for your style to be blood
It is time for you to dump your boyfriend
It is time for you to kiss your girlfriend goodbye
It is time for you to love things like the shaking leaves more
Or at least as much as the heavy cock bursting like a popup book into your mouth
If pussies had eyes they’d be the sky
I may not be on drugs but I am high

I am not broke now
But I am still a poet
And I’ll be broke tomorrow
My teeth are bad and I can’t afford to fix them
The man humming next to me is getting murdered by me in my mind
Humming and typing, his dry red hands, I will see him dead
In my mind before he stops humming, like those pianists who
Play Bach and hum but much less charming.
Die, mind-destroyer.
Die die die.

Sometimes in public I take off my shirt
A lot of people do that
There are photoblogs in which beautiful girls are doing it
I’m not a beautiful girl when I take my shirt off
I’m a poet.

I only want to fuck people who are broke and have no ambition
What is wrong with me
I am such a slut for you
That couple over there
Their zits bright in the subway glare
Maybe I’m a poet

Sweat equity is a real thing
And some things are better left unsaid
Maybe all of these things
Rolling like a penny
Deeper and deeper into the world

–Ariana Reines

The Rumpus.net » Ariana Reines

“Not since Sylvia Plath…

Related Posts:

Love Under Empire

Related Posts:

Liz Axelrod: The Last Book (of Poems) I Loved, Coeur de Lion

Related Posts:

Leanna Moxley: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, The Cow

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Permanent Water

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All Narration Just Congeals

Cœur de Lion is a lyric book, a book about being in love with someone you can’t have, and it unflinchingly acknowledges that the person she falls for is kind of awful.

Related Posts:

National Poetry Month, Day 29: “I’m a Poet and I Don’t Know It” by Ariana Reines

Related Posts: