Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April.
14 Fragments/10 Muses [Re:Sonnet #38]
We’re with James Baldwin in a lofty basement room, with a narrow strip of windows close to the ceiling revealing a moving stream of star-sky. There’s a loud high-pitched sound in the room. “Oh that?” James says. “That’s just the stars howling.”
Me and Sampson Starkweather are making a poem. It goes:
“Beauty is just a series of essays
proving that beauty doesn’t exist.”
I’m staying in the same B&B as Matvei Yankelevich did some ten years ago with a young, moon-faced woman, who is referred to as his “bride.” On the washroom mirror, I find pinned a poem, titled “The Stag and Doe,” that begins:
“In the winter, when the moon is pinched…”
I understand the destruction of this poem will end Matvei’s sadness.
I have successive night-long conversations with Dodie Bellamy and TC Tolbert.
Diane di Prima says: “We danced the dream, and then our dream exploded: ’71, ’72, ’73, ’74.”
I’m in a village in winter, sheltered in the cottony silence of a cottage. There is no electricity; not just here, but anywhere in the world. Amy King is with me. I tell her:
“And since it’s the time
before fabric, since neither of us bows, I guess
I’ll braid your hair forever.”
Amy and I are on our way to a demonstration for the murder of a young man. We meet up with Metta Sama. We are all wearing hoodies of “goddess wool.” Metta explains, “They’ve murdered our desire.”
Bhanu Kapil puts out a call on her blog for people to send her contributions: either in the “ephemeral language” or in the “language of the dead,” which she calls Forban.
I receive a Ziploc bag of pressed dead butterflies. It’s from Vanessa Place. On the very white wings of the largest one is written: “Wittgenstein for Ana.” When I wake, I think, “OK,” go to the shelf and open the Tractatus at random. It says:
“It is only in so far as a proposition is logically segmented that it is a picture of a
situation.”
-Ana Božičević
If you like what the Rumpus is doing for National Poetry Month, you’ll probably like this multimedia anthology of original poems we’ve run at The Rumpus over the last three years. Available only for iPad. Check it out!
