(This text is based on the audio transcript.)
There is this guy in Berlin, a publisher, who asked me for a little book. I wanted to test him, so I sent him poems I would not publish anywhere because no decent person would write poems like this. And he surprised me. I mean, not only he liked them, but he read them so carefully that he copyedited and edited them. So now I have this, oddly enough, this little book of a few poems that will go into a nice edition, accompanied by an artist, I don't know who, and be published in Berlin. I thought in Berlin they might be able to take it, but I don't know -- how amazing that a man named Kevin Tosca, like the opera, who lives in Berlin, and I'm not even sure he's a native English speaker or another kind of English speaker, but could read so carefully and like so much these awfully offensive poems. This guy, you know, he actually knows what he's reading. Okay these poems may not be appropriate for anybody they weren't even for me, I wasn't going to publish them but then in the kind of obscenity that surrounds us they might sound actually a little bit luminous. The book is called Love and they're love poems, really.
love they wore the same pair of panties handing them over to each other after sex to wear until they went to the laundromat. years of back and forth panties frayed over time until only a single strand remained a filament from a wind-torn spiderweb long after the spider moved on your panties win immigrant of the year confess When I recommend writers I never mention names I can’t pronounce. A lot of great writers and artists get no PR on account of this handicap. With good friends I sometimes garble them. It is easier to remember titles. “Ashes and Diamonds” easily beats Andrejecuski or whatever his name is. My pseudonym has cost me millions! new york date beards come back when men are useless eating out is expensive dishes are small the food sucks you want to save some for later beards are takeout bags an aftersex snack is what sex is all about I empty my beard on you, darling! isn’t a nite in new york worth living here for? i wish i was a lesbian in 1968 parental advisory all my poems carry one the vice president a suit in mothballs at the back of the closet waiting to be worn at the funeral new york stories for lynnea new york agent reasonableness written on her face she reports writing a memoir of apple blossoms in old new england summer with dirty harvard boys fresh from the charles river regatta her voice layered with recent trace of big city girl the heart in the foam of her latte no longer sporting its heart she takes a well-bred sip people love their memoirs to sound like f.scott but the nuggets of wisdom that came so easily to f.scott sound corseted and poured into jeans for this encounter until now this was her life up from sarah lawrence to the flatiron cubicle where she reads submissions she will now take an author to lunch in a french bistro an italian count she hopes will whisk her to tuscany freud fries in bar the bartender is tender he’ll be eaten if he’s real nice and so will she she is real nice we hope she won’t be badly bitten unless she likes that sort of thing most people really don’t but barflies are special and butterflies are now rare more rare than the manners of company men eating their buffalo wings with knife & fork pot has been legalized just in time for the great confusion of genders we will all become buttered barflies hetero couplet by ac a woman’s anger at a man will last two times the number of years they’ve been together hetero couplet by lv genitals are not the progenitor of discord viscerally playful tussles trump antiquated tropes if hitler won mobs of herzogs would be running around: every german man would be a percentage of herzog with a majority of hundred percenters punctuation prevents punk situation -Tristan Codrescu Poet, next time, use punk-tuation! Was that worth two centuries of brawl and a lifetime of worry? birth dates emigration dates zeitgeists breaks wars what is the plural of hiatus illusions of freedom within where the holes of culture used to be now overgrown by words tzara had good timing and the radical temperament of youth fondane had bad timing and mistook culture for civilization celan the silence after the apocalypse only a few years separated them they were the same person and each one was many persons an anthology of collective gift and misfortune tzara made a revolution fondane founded a posthumous critical industry tzara's good fortune was fondane's bad luck cavafy without worshiping the hope of barbarians cavafy would have died of boredom and then they came hélas and they were worse than the bourgeois in their cafe chairs cavafy's profound ennui and unspent violence fell to the blade of greater cosmic conformity whose first victims where cultured jews europe without jews was a nasty place a grimm fairy tale alexandria burning in real time an approximate home for l'homme approximatif a dueling ground for shadows loving your murderer was such a christian thing even jesus had his doubts about it hence the fury setting in motion the history of gangs monastic orders motor clubs dark gyms poetry circles even the smallest gang the cubists with only two core members lost count of suicides and murders to quarrel in the cafe for style is one thing to kill your neighbors for dactyls another to be a poet is to remember things that haven't yet happened the unrequited wants of flesh require the burning of books a mixed olfactory
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