Some Poems

Julie Perini. Videos to Be Constructed in Your Head. (Buffalo, 2007) 8 pp. A small book , 5.5"X4", picked up at Squeaky Wheel or Hallwalls last summer. A brief homage to Yoko Ono's 1962 Tokyo exhibition Paintings to Be Constructed in Your Head. 6 brief instructions or prompts for the imagination: #1 "This is a video unlike anything/you have seen before." #2 "This is a video to be read out loud/so go back and read this out loud./Try not to feel shy or awkward about it." and #3 "this is a short video. " If the early 1960s were an age of conceptual, Fluxus art, ours is an age of repetitions.


Rikki Ducornet, illustrated by T. Motley. Clean. (an excerpt from The One Marvelous Thing, Dalkey Archive Press, 2008). A small, 5.5"X2", 12-page "freebie" booklet done after the style of Jack Chick's proselytizing, fear-inducing pamphlets. Drives the notion of "cleanliness" to absurd heights: "And Jesus says: 'Do you smell good and are you the color of roast veal?' And the old folks answer 'O yes, Lord, we are clean and Our thoughts are like white sauce and our blood is like water and we are ready, O sweet Jesus." Funny and gross, quite a combo.

d.a. levy. "What can I say?" (poem one-fold excerpt from RANDOM SIGHTINGS WITH NO ONE AROUND, Kirpan Press, 2007). 4 pp. 6"X4". This poem is subtitled "for r.j.s May 10, 1967/imprisoned for making a moral decision to help other young people even if it meant endangering himself". levy's friend was hounded, censored, jailed, etc., in Cleveland, OH. It takes the attitude of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and crafts an angry portrait of a loss of identity amidst a culture of fear and suspicion.

this poem is wired
they are listening
they are in the audience
they are in the poem
they are in the words
they are waiting for something obscene
for something un-american
for something about drugs

they dont know
i am as frightened as
they are


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