POETRY
A stench-choked catacomb filled with the decaying remains of several amateur swings at poetics.
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Murder Brain
Murder Brain
a poem about death and aesthetics
2023. Written for a Marxist Poetics class taught by George Kovalenko. One of the strengths of Kovalenko's class was the freedom it allowed you verse-wise, and because I had absolutely no familiarity with poetry this was my first attempt to, after having read some, slap together something that vaguely resembled it. It definitely comes off as snarky and topical, which at this point is a register I find boring to the point of murderous resentment, but I think it helped me nail the fundamentals of how a poem looks, feels, and establishes a relationship with the audience on the page. One of the pieces that helped me refine my passion for sonic work.
ADMIT TO ME YOU'RE STRAIGHT AND THE COMMUNISTS WILL FALTER
ADMIT TO ME YOU'RE STRAIGHT AND THE COMMUNISTS WILL FALTER
a poem about wanting things from people who don’t want to give them to you
2023. Written for a Marxist Poetics class taught by George Kovalenko. We wrote three poems over the course of the quarter, and this was the midterm installment. At this point I was reading not just for class but for pleasure. I'd caught the bug, and you can see it pretty clearly in the piece. It's heavily, heavily influenced by some parts of Vladimir Mayakovsky's incredible poem A Cloud In Trousers, which I still read roughly once a week. I wanted to find a way to capture the utter indignation of that poem, which rang through me like a struck bell for hours after I first read it- The poem is, I believe, the ideal theatre in which to shout at people who aren't listening to you anymore.
CHEAP BLEACH FOR APOSTATES
CHEAP BLEACH FOR APOSTATES
a poem about rites of passage
2023. Written for a Marxist Poetics class taught by George Kovalenko. The last poem in the class. For this one, I wanted to focus on an image, and develop it with meaning- More affect than plot or invective. I was more comfortable with being spare and leaving certain things hanging, letting certain aspects hold weight instead of leaning in and overexplaining to the point of pyrotechnics. It took about a week to get absolutely right, and I fought with it further when I did the final draft, but in my mind that subconscious stubbornness and attachment to perfection is the sign of an idea that I genuinely care about. Probably my favorite of the three.
rare thing
rare thing
a bad poem
2023. Ostensibly written for Marxist Poetics. Mostly it's an attempt to--as per the advice of the indispensable George Kovalenko--invert the usual register and turn it, in his words, "still and small, like the voice of God". I don't know what I did but I'm pretty sure it isn't that. This one is the only one on here with any genuine honesty behind it and I didn't like writing it as a result, but it wasn't going to crawl out of me on its own. It is less a poem and more a clumsy, inadvisable attempt at self-surgery.
APPLE POEM
APPLE POEM
a poem i wrote at my job, which is mostly apples
2023. Written for an Advanced Creative Writing class taught by Joanna Howard. This one is pretty rough- One of the things about poetry is that if you don't read it you're not going to write it, and without academic impetus I tend to curl back into my fetid little literary fiction hole. The assignment was to develop a piece playing with the image of an apple, and because by night I masquerade as a produce stiff at a grocery store I have quite a lot to say about apples. To the point of some artless unsubtlety. I'd been out of the game for a few months and it shows, but there are times I feel like it earns its overbearing voice, and I think I get some points because I did in fact write most of it on a series of fifteen-minute breaks from stocking apples.
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