PoemLink No. 1: The Small Things
Welcome to POEMLINK, a poetry roundup which promises to be a not-so-infrequent curation of pieces that have recently caught our attention in literary journals and magazines online. POEMLINK aims to provide an eclectic selection of pieces we find special, innovative, or simply amusing. Let us scour the world of internet poetry so you don’t have to.
“Nothing may seem less propitious for thinking about modernist avant-garde poetry than cuteness.” (Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories). Ngai’s comment derives from the lingering inheritance that modernist, avant-garde, or experimental work must be difficult—and therefore serious and anything but cute. We’d like to think otherwise. Of course while the pleasure of cuteness can be distracting, or part of an infantile capitalist fantasy, we’d like to imagine cuteness—and the feminine prowess which it can harbour—can tilt the ways we move through the world. Below, you’ll find selections of pieces we found to embrace the cute and/or miniature without sacrificing the kinds of formal commitments that make poetry as necessary and inventive as it can be today.
—PL
1. “Did you know baby sloths mistake / their own arms / for branches? Then fall & die”? Although just a myth—and it seems Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is to blame—the image is devastatingly cute. Read Kara Dorris’s “The Baby Sloth Syndrome” for more kinds of tiny misconstruals up at DIAGRAM .
2. What happens when beauty inhabits its own end? A. Prevett’s “Girl/Rampant,” published in Hobart, shows us one of its “designs”: “I am barred forever / from the vault of essentialism.”
3. We forget that writing is drawing. “Renee Gladman’s Sentence Structures” in The Paris Review recall to us the architecture of every kind of linguistic mark. These image-excerpts are from her newest work, One Long Black Sentence.
4. Multiply your chances at love and read Dorothy Chan’s “Triple Sonnet, Because I’m a Lucky Girl” and more up at Diode.
5. Although this last one is from a novel—in fact, a poet’s novel—Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal, excerpted in Canadian Art, has us returning to its densely lyrical pages:
“I was not a sign; therefore, I wasn’t a woman either. The image was a fecund entanglement, an infraction that acted within the person, and between persons, and between eras also, a complex of memory, minerals, sensation, and lust.”
Prathna Lor
Prathna Lor, the poetry editor of Shrapnel, is a poet, essayist, and educator currently living in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Their writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, C Magazine, Jacket2, and Canadian Literature, among other places.