Thanks to The Rome Review for tucking a poem of mine called "After Jazz" in amongst some really wonderful work by Blake Butler, George Singleton, Steve Almond and Kathleen Rooney, among others.
In his book The Other Lover, my friend Bruce Smith has a great poem called "Afterbody" where we get, among other things, this:
"...From the most meager
scraps of voice on the telephone--
a half tone or quarter tone--
he pieces the body together: widow's peak, collarbones,
pelvic tilt, lobes and clefts, the body cloned
from some pressures and inflections,
a stammered word, interference, aspiration."
And I say thee yea, Bruce Smith! Yeah, yea. By our diction shall we be known, shall make ourselves known, shall manifest our very lives aloud, and those of our characters, and thank you for saying so so clearly.
April 22, 2009, 8:57 a.m.Category: Poetry
