This is a motifational poem. The motif motifates the writer, spurring associations to render the poem into a unity, if only a superficial, galvanizing unity. But where would anything be without either motifation or superficilaity? Nature made man & man makes superficial motifations. It's endless. The motif for me is occasioned by a form of …
Yoon Yong is drunk again. Drinking to forget again (nearly home time) …3 bottles of Soju later & staggering thoughtfully through tight gullies | her stomach packed full of pig | mouth reeking of garlic noxious enough to stun a jindo—the stars like pheasant tracks —if you count all the stars is …
Continue reading "Drinking to forget again (nearly home time)"
There will be a Yoon Yong poem today & tomorrow. I promise. Appearances …My cheekbones are fine | my chin if a little chiseled. I don’t agree with where my hair parts the same as my father’s | not symmetrical like my mother. Glad I got mother’s long legs but my father’s …
(More untidy, preliminary insights from reading Heidegger. ) Taking a thing for granted is complex. There is an art to not taking something for granted. Being in the world is firmly established, as we interact with other things, tools or technologies, in order to provide the balance needed to be alive, we don’t exactly sense …
Continue reading "Learning the art of not-taking-for-granted"
Still trying to get my head on straight, I have the neck thread into the shoulders, but maybe the thread has worn on the fixture or on the head. Toggling, wiggling to get the thread in place, the satisfying couple of the track of the thread so that the light bulb blinks on into full, …
(The following is taken from a thread on the blog of the poet Cynthia Jobin https://littleoldladydotnet.wordpress.com/) According to my favorite Book of Forms (Lewis Turco, 1968)….DROIGNEACH (pronounced dray-ee-nock) is Irish. Syllabic. A loose stanza form. The single line may consist of from nine to thirteen syllables, and it always ends in a tri-syllabic word. There is …
Thanks to Krishna Prasad for taking these 5, which, I don't think are very easy poems & particularly the last poem, which is about the Seorak War Memorial in which the poet imagines histories superimposed in real time. I went through a stage of submitting poems without titles, simply using the lemniscate & this has …
The 4th poem from my long narrative poem Yoon Yong. (If you go to 'Korea Poems' in the menu, you can find the first 3.) I still keep looking over these, thinking they should be read in a book, but I have yet to take action toward this, I still haven't quite remedied with myself …
Continue reading "Midflight digression III Yoon Yong on language (8:37 a.m.)"
Pleased to be publishing Tom Laichas’ poems on Underfoot today.
If you have poems you think we’d be interested in, check our submission details & get in touch with either me or Tim.
In the midst of the naming, the boy asks: What’s your name?
The Voice remembers: years in the future, others will ask this question. The reply is the same: I am what I am.
The boy: That’s not an answer. We’re all what we all are, nameless or no.
The Voice: But it’s you who must come when called.
1.
Once torn apart, the two freshly skinned bodies take the names given to them. The boy takes one name and the girl another.
They learn the words I and mine.
It will be easy to swallow the fruit.
2.
The girl wonders aloud: what name would I take if the verses hadn’t spoken first?
3.
About his own name, the boy says nothing. He thinks: it has been mine all along.
That first week, all the seasons tumble…
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Very glad that my 1st act as Underfoot’s new guest editor, is to publish a handful of Marie Marshall’s poems (no relation).
Put succinctly, Marie Marshall is the bee’s knees, legitimately one of the finest poets i have discovered during my forage of the Internet, finest poet FULL STOP. Never a word wasted nor misused, never a thought wanting, always impossible to anticipate, & at times full of humour; Marie is my kind of poet. Enjoy.To read more of Marie’s work go here, spend the afternoon, put a pot of coffee on, set a plate of biscuits, maybe, a mix of Garibaldi & Custard Creams.
The river’s in constant re-set mode,
sighting by its hand against the banks
what’s up and what’s down. It has
the tattoo of the sky in its eye. Two
girls, leaning against the wall, ignore
it, choosing instead to contemplate
:
hills and the warmth of each other’s
shoulder, but each has plashed puddles
that have (since) closed up, that eye
winking out. The river’s voice is
understated, catch some in a bucket
and it’s abated. Call by to see brother
:
Perch in his green-and-silver suit, to
maintain a plastic pot for washing
your brushes, to extract and filter.
Renew! The sun turns you to molten
copper. The river’s dare is born of
hills and ephemeral daymare tails.
from Potty Poetry
(a handful of poems printed on cards and left in the toilets at Burning Man 2016)
1.
We met right here,
but this is no sleazy…
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