This is the fourth time we at The Rumpus have celebrated National Poetry Month by running a new, original poem by a different poet every day of April (and sometimes a little beyond). You’ll be able to keep up with every poem by following @RumpusPoetry or @The_Rumpus on Twitter, or by checking the Facebook pages for The Rumpus and Rumpus Poetry for announcements.
This year’s first selection comes from Douglas Kearney, author of The Black Automaton, which Evan Peterson reviewed for us back in 2010. Kearney’s poems confront the reader on more than just the written level–they are visual in a way which makes them impossible to recreate using basic HTML coding, so I won’t even try. I’m embedding a JPEG image of the poem, just as Kearney provided it to me.
-Douglas Kearney
2 responses
God, I adore Douglas Kearney. That was a mind-sweeping book to review. Great to see his work up on Rumpus!
Those last 5 lines are a poem in & of themselves, and yet such gobsmacking punctuation to the whole. Somehow those 5 lines, when you think about them, are inherently both prologue & epilogue to this tale.
Thanks for “hottentot”; I’m placing it on my vocabulary shelf for future wordplay.
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