Skip to main content

Poem by K. Silem Mohammad

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome K. Silem Mohammad (pictured) this Friday. When I was speaking with Charles Bernstein in London a few weeks back, he recommended his work to me, as being among the most interesting, and funniest, contemporary American poetry being created today. His work, which will strike some British poetry readers as merely rebarbative, is precisely so, aimed at taking poetic language out of the realm of a discourse that validates mere craft or the well-made. Instead, here is language writing in uncomfortable zones, disconcertingly able to inscribe the usually unsaid, unwritten. Plus, it's zany.

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004) and Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003).

His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including New American Writing, Fence, Bay Poetics, and The Best American Poetry 2004. He maintains the poetry and poetics blog Lime Tree and the film blog Lost in the Frame.

With Anne Boyer, he edits Abraham Lincoln, a journal of poetry. He teaches creative writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland.


Picasso

I am not a whore but many of my friends are
it is an ugly time but they should look at me and vomit
and then probably commit suicide

at age 45 a woman in her early thirties
was very important to my stupid twig bones
under the gaze of that elusive hard-on Picasso

each time you fly you kill a bird
and also you fail for being a little bandwagon
and hating RuneScape

if only I wasn’t such a dowager
done up in murders
just like the Babylonian

and as for this white power nonsense
I spent about a year on that game
baby got big and she’s gonna get bigger

“but whore’s the lodge?” demanded Miss Maria
“hero ma’am” replied Dorcas
these tastes pop and vanish in my mouth

everything on this planet
every toothless polar bear
the name of the blog hasn’t changed

reload this page look at me
I am a stupid man
I have nothing

no one cares about my work
I have wasted my life
I guess you could combine spam and football


poem by K. Silem Mohammad
Labels:

Comments

Unknown said…
Hmm. I confess that I do like that very much. I'm off to find more.
Sat Jun 21, 08:12:00 pm 2008
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A  poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.
Post a Comment
Read more

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...
15 comments
Read more

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
3 comments
Read more