PhillySound: new poetry

The lastest issue of FENCE Magazine is out, and I've been looking forward to it because some of my (Soma)tic Exercises are included and dedicated to my friend Brenda Iijima. Brenda's amazing essay "Metamorphic Morphology Meeting in Language: P as in Poetry, Poetry Rhetorical for the Election Season" was also to appear. In the end FENCE editors rejected her essay on the grounds that it was too political, too much like a manifesto, or some such bullshit! AT A TIME WHEN OUR GOVERNMENT AND COUNTRY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR NEARLY ONE MILLION INNOCENT LIVES BEING LOST IN IRAQ, and a host of other atrocities, BRENDA IIJIMA'S ESSAY IS TOO POLITICAL!?

Before anyone starts sending me stupid e-mails, YES, I'm well aware that editors can do whatever they want! But I can also be pissed off if I want! The good news is that it will be published in the debut issue of CRITIPHORIA, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime here is a sample of her brilliant essay:


from "Metamorphic Morphology Meeting in Language: P as in Poetry, Poetry Rhetorical for the Election Season"

"Poems can ooze like sludge, suck (more interesting than gravitational pull!)—syntax dangling thickly in clumps, slimy, greasy—hungry. Green up verbs to be. Lyrical Is (plural of I) join rocks in igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic processes. Contentious histories heat the fortified walls of denial's antechambers. Language intermingles. Diction can express the health of earthworms, microbes, intestinal flora, etc., (additional meanings of culture grow). Landfills belching methane offer us a cross-section of the sublimated quotidian—the consumer burial mounds where the discarded nouns of our lives lie wasting. Refuse lingual—new processes for poems to undergo. Words, dirt, filtration—rich, moist soil in the works. O dirt, expansive erogenous depth!"

--posted by CAConrad