Michael Leong's Philosophy of Decomposition/Re-composition as Explanation

Last summer, right before Crane Giamo and Kelley Irmen left Fort Collins, CO for Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Daniel Bailey and I went to their house to say goodbye and take their pictures. They had sold everything, so we didn’t have much to do but sit out on the landing right outside their doorway and watch Crane light things on fire.

Crane made his own gunpowder. Out of his own urine. And he showed us these wild designs he could make on paper if he sprinkled a little powder and lit it with a spark. He gave me an envelope full of charred willow sticks (amazing for drawing and also made in someone’s backyard) and he and Dan burned holes in paper. Man, I miss you guys.

A few months later, Dan and I got a copy of The Philosophy of Decomposition / Recomposition as Explanation: A Poe and STein Mash Up by Michael Leong. Each copy was handmade by Crane, laid out by Jared Schickling. And each copy features an original piece of gunpowder artwork. It’s an experience just to hold these in your hands.

Leong’s poetry works well with the book art, and let’s face it, the book art really has the potential to overshadow the words it’s holding together. But instead, the design really compliments the book’s subject, “a mash-up/re-mix/collage of Poe’s The Philosophy of Composition and Stein’s Composition as Explanation.

I hadn’t read either of these two works so I don’t know that I would have picked this up without a recommendation. And this long poem is heady, there’s no getting around that. I mean it’s not a beach read, it’s not something I would bring to an airport. It’s more for keeping around when you need to have a think about something. Like after you’ve been watching The Wonder Years for like, 3 hours straight and want to feel your brain work again. It’s smart and beautiful and yes, at times difficult to wrap your head around but we all need that sometimes, don’t we?

I want to also talk about Delete Press’s work in general, because we were lucky to receive with The Philosophy of . . . a box Crane had made as a literal vessel for poetry. It was so cool to have a tactile piece of work — something that connects reading to seeing to experiencing. Have ya’ll read Anne Carson’s Nox? Dan brought it home from a class last year. That is a beautiful box of words and collage. It’s cumbersome and it’s not easily digestible and you have to work at it. It’s extraordinary.

Delete Press’s limited edition chapbooks do that, too. The founders of Delete Press (Crane, Jared, and Brad Vogler) are concerned with making beautiful books. Otherwise, they’d print out more than 90 or 70 or 17 copies of a work. There’s just something so fascinating to me about a press that is willing to put that kind of effort into every single book (and not charge an arm and a leg for that kind of exclusivity, either).

As someone who works online, professionally (basically a professional internet user), I find myself increasingly interested in the limited, the tacticle, the things that take time and patience. Letter writing. Photocopying ‘Zines. Collaging with scissors instead of photoshop. It lets my eyeballs do less work when my other senses are busy working, too.  So while I’m the first to admit that I wouldn’t necessarily pick up a pee powder burn book (literally, you guys), I’m glad that I know the founders and am thus forced to pick up their books. These guys are talented, and they work with incredibly smart writers. They inspire me to keep creating, and they prove that poetry can be experienced beyond words.

We Think It Is One Thing but It Changes to Another

As I carried this book around with me, reading, I heard from multiple passersby, “Gross, is that someone throwing up?” to which I replied, “No, I think it is just a kid bobbing for apples.” Their responses then were usually calm, mostly understanding, with maybe even a restatement like we are all guilty of: “Oh. I thought it was someone puking.”

This to me is reading Jason Bredle’s Smiles of the Unstoppable — we think it is one thing but it changes to another, and then another, until we start to see that evolution is the thing that Bredle is chasing down with his use of words.

from “The Song Banana”:

“Sometimes I love the song banana and sometimes the song banana
makes me completely crazy
is what I wrote on a postcard, placed in my pocket
and walked to Happy Foods
wondering what might happen
on one of those days
I’d been feeling especially lost.”

Bredle uses both line breaks as well as word choice to negate what comes before, to change objects from one line to the next, to stay ahead of the reader by steps and steps. Smiles of the Unstoppable is a mountain of these, all well-crafted and burbling, so while this effect could be awful in the wrong hands, it is fantastically resonant here. Bredle, in his third collection of poems, has an understanding of how this evolution affects us as we read — knowledge that this practice of ever-changing keeps us forward, makes us want, keeps us stooping curiously close the page.

from “Kitchen Stadium at Twilight”:

“Man, that dude looks exactly like Scott.
I mean, freakishly tall yet also short with crazy non-crazy hair
falling all over his shoulders which aren’t shoulders
but instead comets.”

Add a soft mixture of culture and lit prowess and urban-dictionary slang to this always negating, always changing, always evolving style of poetry, and Bredle has me officially on his side. I am won over by his palette, by the color of his shapes, by the accumulation of his techniques and the words within them. And I’m not even sure if it was a battle, though there is some delicious fight in Smiles of the Unstoppable, a bite and phrases to chew.

from “Poem”:

“So far we’ve been focusing on here and now,
yet not focused on here and now but there and yesterday—
a red kitchen, ceramic roosters,
gravel driveway,
basketball hoop and fence separating us from the woods.
I remember these things fondly,
but how will I remember here and now
when they become there and yesterday?”

I feel like Jason Bredle is fucking with us, just a little bit, and I kind of like it.

Caution! Do not read Galerie de Difformité (or this recommendation) straight through from start to finish!

[1] I was selling books at the Chicago Book Expo for &Now Books, when a woman walked up to our modest booth and picked up Galerie de Difformité I gave her the usual spiel, “This is our newest book, and it’s actually my favorite. It’s pretty unusual, I guess postmodern.” Her eyes grew wide when she cracked the book open. “The author actually encourages you to not read the book straight through.” She proceeded to shudder, throw down the book, and exclaim, “I can’t do it! I can’t do it!” So, okay, Galerieis not for everyone, at least not for those who aren’t willing to tease the boundaries of traditional writing.

[2] You are here. Go back and read section [1] or stop reading this recommendation. Or, if you must, go to section [4].

[3] By the way, Galerie is dedicated to you. Yeah, you. Seriously. It’d be common courtesy to at least buy a copy. Now go to section [8].

[4] If you like pictures in your book, you’ll like Galerie. If you like destroying / deforming / improving the printed word, you’ll love Galerie.

[5] When I was little, I read choose-your-own-adventure stories. The first time, I would read it like the book dictated, out of order, following a pseudo-self-guided path. Then, when I was not satisfied with the path I chose, I read the whole book cover to cover. A slew of stories were hiding in that book somewhere, and I needed to find them. This is how I read Galerie de Difformité. I still feel like I haven’t found all its hidden treasures.

[6] Read Galerie if you don’t know who you are. Read Galerie if you’ve ever wondered what it means to be beautiful.

[7] Read section [3], even though I know you already did because tradition compels you to read a book (or recommendation) straight through. But really, didn’t you read the title?

[8] When I visited Florence, I decided not to visit Dante’s house. (1. I never really liked Dante. 2. They were charging 10 Euros to get in). I probably would have visited Beatrice’s house if Florence had assigned one to her like Verona had for Juliette. Beatrice is a mysterious woman. She existed, yes, but where do the lines blur between historical truth and literary hyperbole? Galerie is narrated by Beatrice. Well, a deformed version of this elusive Florentine. I’m thankful the book is not narrated by Dante.

[9] Go here and deform an exhibit in the Galerie.

[10] Galerie is an adventure, so if you’re looking for an easy read to kick back with after a long day’s work, don’t read Galerie. Save it for when you’re ready to think.

Morocco Is Not A Noun

Knowing both Kendra and Matthew knowing parts of their history together knowing them individually knowing them personally is a pleasure. Knowing the color of their eyes knowing that one likes to lean back while the other sits up during a conversation on Skype knowing the way either of them smokes a cigarette knowing the regular tones of their voices. Being a part of their history their history of their love their history together and how that history came to be and what that meant and what that means and what that will mean. With Morocco they offer that to anyone they offer a written history that shows pieces of their similarities that shows pieces of their differences from each other and from us. That they wrote poems to each other while living in different cities that they wrote poems to each other while together in the same city that they wrote poems to each other at all is important to their shared history is important to our shared history. Redefining seemingly insignificant moments in the story of their history is how their Morocco begins to surprisingly form.

i’ve been trying to
watch children walk
lately, to see exactly
what you meant
by that

Many histories of love start rapidly they start so fast that they will always finish. They start too fast and then they finish and that is the end of that particular history of love. Morocco is a history of love that has an end but not a finish. Morocco is a history of love that starts gradually that started more gradual than most other histories of love that finish fast. Morocco is a history of love that ends without a finish. Defining the space between them is how Kendra and Matthew make their Morocco the story of their history is made from instants that most others would let go would let pass un-noticed.

the moment we moved beyond
whatever we were
to whatever we are now
happened when you pushed
on my bladder
and i fell down

Many histories of love have been written before. Many written histories of love involve stories of love written from within stories of love written around stories of love. Many written histories of love have been remarkable and such stories of love are the exciting ones. With so many histories of love written before writing a history of love seems an easy thing to do. Writing an exciting history of love is not an easy thing to do. In their history of love Kendra and Matthew write a history of love that makes a history of love that is exciting and that is interesting. Their history of love shows many stories of love some that have been written before and many more that have not. Some that may seem familiar to us and some that may not. Their written history of love is interesting because we do not know necessarily which person is writing their history of love at any given moment within their story of love. Their written history of love is exciting because we come to understand how each of their histories of love is entwined to make one mutual history of love. Kendra and Matthew take their own history of love take their own histories of love and make one complete history of love. From many histories of love they make one a very remarkable and exciting one. Such a history of love is what is needed now and always.

it would be a pity if i ended up
murdering you in your sleep

Oh No Everything is Wet Now is a rebellion against the standardisation of literature.

Making space for literature is a challenge. Aside from finding the physical spaces required to store your ever-mounting collection of books, it can also be a challenge to create the mental space required to really relax and enjoy a book. This issue is only exacerbated online. In virtual space, literature really has to fight for your attention. Often, it can feel like the reader is privileging a story or poem by choosing it over an infinity of others. Some have concluded that conventional literature does not function in a web browser: the distractions are too great.

I wish to propose that the problem is not necessarily the literature, but the spaces we create for it.

The majority of virtual space is ordered in series of familiar patterns. Nearly every English language webpage follows the structure of a traditional book, where one reads from left to right and top to bottom. The web page commonly asks you to scroll up and down, but hardly ever side to side. This remains true even in cases where webpages have little to no text. There is an assumed freedom in knowing that a blog entry can never be too long, an issue can never be too filled. Virtual spaces are seemingly infinite.

Due to this expanse, much web-based information is presented as comprehensively categorised and fragmented. On many websites, one topic or article can be spread across plural webpages. It is increasingly rare to find two distinct articles occupying one virtual space.

In this online architecture, there is no navigational freedom. Interaction is guided and ordered.

However, there can be space for resistance. In an attempt to demonstrate this, we can look to Ana C. and Richard Chiem’s Oh No Everything is Wet Now (Magic Helicopter Press, 2011).

Ana and Richard are both young, highly successful writers. Both edit journals -- Ana: New Wave Vomit; Richard: Vertebrae -- and both have forthcoming debut books -- Ana: Baby Babe (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2012); Richard: You Private Person (Scrambler Books, 2012). They are well liked within the online community, but (as yet) relatively unknown outside of it.

Oh No Everything is Wet Now is their first collaborative project. The e-book is introduced as a novella (a historically disruptive form) despite being a collection of flash fiction and poetry. Magic Helicopter’s home page encourages us to both "follow" and "unfollow" the lines. These dichotomies in definition and suggestion help to shape the unorthodox approach required to encounter the novella.

Oh No Everything is Wet Now opposes all established conventions on the ordering of virtual space. Magic Helicopter Press has created an environment that demands exploration. The novella has consciously chosen to refuse the ease of expositional space, demanding that we engage with the book. Rather than deter the reader, the disorientation generates a curiosity.

I believe that the architecture behind this virtual space can expose some missed opportunities in online literature. Rather than continually attempting to emulate printed journals, Oh No Everything is Wet Now demonstrates how to seize the potential afforded to us by the Internet.

There is no correct way to read this "book". All of its content is presented to us at once. The webpage consciously affirms the decision to waste virtual space, using empty expanses that have been designed to inconvenience us. These areas must be navigated through to reach the literature. Rather than have their content reveal itself, Ana and Richard demand that it must be sought out. This is unheard of in traditional web architecture.

Our simulated journey around the webpage is reflected in the novella’s content, much of which is made up of YouTube videos. The clips show the novella’s authors on an ambling, playful journey of their own. The videos hide loading bars, which is surprisingly unnerving. One quickly gathers that these videos are not to be consumed, they occupy a permanent position is the make up of this virtual space; they are immediately relevant to the rest of the web page. The variation in their sizing suggests a knowing playfulness in the sophisticated architecture, drawing further attention to how presentation informs content.

Setting can broadly split the videos: interior/exterior. The internal clips see one, or both authors sitting still, reading in flat monotone. However, when Ana and Richard take us outside, they become enthused and playful.

By creating a distinction between the private and public sphere, the authors draw attention to flawed assumptions over online literature. The mobility of a book is no longer unrivalled. Wifi internet and affordable laptops have placed the computer in a central and uniting position between the working and social, private and public, interior and exterior.

Ana and Richard play on these disruptions by inverting classical standards. It is the interior, private Ana and Richard who present themselves very seriously: these are artists, responsible for addressing the viewer / reader on the other side of the screen. We become aware of looking in on them, putting us in the role of voyeur. In one section, this is reflexively acknowledged, as Richard is shown watching MDMA Films’ Bebe Zeva whilst narrating the experience.

However, the exterior, public, Ana and Richard act childishly. Their literature becomes a lived experience, a more plausible collaboration. It is a game that we are invited to become complicit in.

In his HTML Giant review, Matthew Simmons refers to the page as a collage (another technique that has been classically connected to the concept of resistance). His observation is acute. Within this architecture, content is frequently layered over other content. Some areas are packed tightly together whilst other spaces sit barren. The most sophisticated collage technique though, is Ana and Richard’s embrace of multi-media. It is here that Oh No Everything is Wet Now breaks most definitively from literature’s traditional, discrete language of virtual space.

Texts within the e-book are presented as screenshots of a word processor. Rather than making the text seem inadequate in comparison to video, this non-professional presentation lets the text seem raw and anonymous when compared to the videos. Their inclusion compounds our new awareness of being influenced by methods of presentation. By establishing a dialog between videos and texts, Ana and Richard create a resistance that suggests the accompanying words are barely an alternative, thus liberating literature from both the page and word processor.

Oh No Everything is Wet Now is a rebellion against the standardisation of literature. The collaborative relationship between Ana and Richard drives the novella, without managing to be expositional. We learn nothing of these two central figures. Instead, we join them on an absent procession.

If resistance is not possible through interaction, we may strive towards it in our creation of content. Oh No Everything is Wet Now demonstrates how the Internet affords us the tools for innovation in modern literature. It is down to us how we use them.

An Interview with Ander Monson

Ander Monson and I grew up in the same small community that separates the United States from Canada. I think the title of his new book of poems, The Available World, published in July 2010 by Sarabande Books, is fitting, as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan seems so unavailable to the rest of the world. Ander was kind enough to answer a few question on TAW during his winter break from teaching at the University of Arizona.

*

Jeni Jobst: Give me a one-sentence description of The Available World.

Ander Monson: One big constantly-expanding and -contracting ball. I realize that’s not much of a sentence, but then I’ve never been good at those.

JJ: Why was the “paintball” cover chosen?

AM: The Ball of Paint (actually not a Paint Ball — there’s a difference which gets elucidated in Vanishing Point, in which the Ball of Paint features significantly — though I see that it’s credited as “paintball” in the front matter of TAW, which is actually just a function of what I named the file before I understood the distinction, and in this way it carries its own record of error) is an amazing image, isn’t it? There’s one poem at least that refers specifically to it in TAW, but mostly I loved how the image suggests a cosmology, which is something the book wants to talk about or enact too. It also echoes the shape of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula (see also “ball” on the Vanishing Point website, and the idea of muchness and availability. I also dig how it connects the two books, which came out within a couple months of each other in 2010. This networking happened with Other Electricities and Vacationland too.

JJ: You’ve mentioned in a previous interview with The Adirondack Review that you like the topic of isolation. Other than what you told them, about underlying tension surfacing, do you feel isolated? Did you, in the U.P.? Does it matter where one lives?

AM: I’m not sure exactly what I meant by that (it was a while ago; brains change; it’s all flux, which is one of the nice things about thinking/being/writing), actually. But isolation has been and continues to be an important force of my writing process. It’s certainly everywhere in my books, particularly in Vacationland and my essay “I Have Been Thinking About Snow,” both the page and the video version. I think that every artist feels isolated. There’s a reason why most of us who are drawn to making art are outsiders in one way or another. I suspect you have to engage in that kind of retreat from the world in order to see the thing from enough distance to want to talk about or iterate or engage with it in language or image. I find that even the sort of self-imposed isolation of several hours of silence, that is, me not talking, often starts to build up a tension in me that often leads to a burst of writing. Certainly growing up in the U. P. I felt isolated. For me it’s an isolating place. That’s a function of the culture and the weather (and the weather makes the culture, or draws those with a predisposition, maybe, to isolation from other cold climes and isolated, wild places), and much more so when I was growing up than it probably is now (the Internet is a sort of leveler). Even more so, I suspect, for my father, and my father’s father, before the bridge was built to connect the peninsulas. I’m sure that one can find isolation in the flux of big cities too (there’s lots written about that sort of anonymity), and wherever, but Upper Michigan’s isolation seems particular, and particularly interesting.

JJ: Does the title indicate that knowledge of what’s available in the world only enhances your love of isolation?

AM: There’s definitely an interplay in the poems between availability and isolation. It’s a tension, sure, and in my view that’s one of the plots of the book: muchness and diminishing. They crest and trough, a sort of zero sum game. I don’t think that the poems have a collective thesis, exactly, but that they are different ways of exploring a particular digital / analog world and worldview from the perspective of availability and isolation, among other entry points.

JJ: Many of the poems in TAW are “sermons.” Does your love of sermon rhetoric stem from personal religious experience?

AM: You know, I wish I’d had a more interesting religious upbringing. I grew up Presbyterian-Congregationalist in Houghton, which is to say largely unreligious. I remember my pastor saying “well, if there is a God” at one point, and me thinking, hmmm. The sermons I remember were mostly dull, hardly a reason to come to church. I liked the singing and the lemon bars and the pot lucks, but stopped right about when I was confirmed. My interest in the sermon comes out of living in Alabama (I went to grad school there) and being around the culture of the Baptist church, which is a whole lot more exciting. I don’t have any real belief in it, exactly, but the shapes of their services, or the services of, say, some Pentecostals — there’s real fire there. You can feel the rhetoric in your body: that’s what good rhetoric should do: affect the body. I can see a version of myself growing up in a church that was either more demonstrative and performative, or else more invested in its own mystery (like Catholicism or maybe Mormonism) and how that might have held me more closely. So I learned to love the sermon, and I thought well, why not repurpose the sermon, as best I could, for poetry?

JJ: Your “armless brother” pops up more than once in this collection. Why? Do you have an armless brother?

AM: The armless brother character showed up first in Other Electricities, and he showed up in Vacationland, and to a much smaller extent, in one of the essays in Neck Deep. I am not fully sure why he still draws me, but he does. He came from a line I wrote in a failed poem (maybe a story, I don’t remember) in an undergraduate workshop, I think. It didn’t work out in the poem/story, but he became a character of interest in the constellation of my work. I do have a brother, but he has arms.

JJ: How long does it take you to write a poem?

AM: It depends a lot. There are a few poems in the book that were written in more or less a sitting — an hour or two. Sometimes you get lucky. All of them started with a burst of generative something, and then sat, sometimes for five years, at the back of my mind somewhere, undergoing occasional revisions. Most of them went through somewhere between a dozen and twenty drafts. Nearly all of them that were published in journals or wherever were significantly rewritten for the book. One of them, “For Orts,” became a sestina between its publication in Beloit Poetry Journal and its final home in the book. Well, by final home I suppose I mean temporary home. You never know where they’ll end up.

JJ: With what poet do you feel most akin?

AM: You know, I don’t really feel like I’m part of a tradition, or feel a real kinship with a lot of poets. That’s probably willfully naive to say, but it’s true. There are real echoes of A. R. Ammons in TAW, I think, but only some of his work. I have a weird connection with the work of Simone Muench, a poet whose chapbook New Michigan Press, the small press I run, published a ways back. I remember reading her poems and them making my mouth go wow in a familiar way, and recognizing something there. I’m in the middle of reading Julie Paegle’s torch song tango choir which is quite lovely. I read slowly because it’s really working for me, so it tends to give rise to my own language. And Nick Lantz’s We Don’t Know We Don’t Know. I read a lot of poetry, actually, maybe unsurprisingly. Albert Goldbarth’s Opticks, though I wouldn’t put myself in the same league as his work at all. What he does is beyond my comprehension and amazing in its own way, though some of our interests align. There’s so much out there, much of it a crapfest, but some of it remarkable. It’s one of the reasons I continue to edit my small press and my magazine: to stay connected to what others are doing in the world, and to try to publish the work that gets me hot.

JJ: What’s next?

AM: Writing-wise I’m in the midst of a collection of short essays (<750 words as of this writing, though that constraint may go) that start as poems written in response to things (texts, objects, images, conversations, whatever) found in some way in libraries. I imagine it being published as cards in a box, designed to be tucked into books as something for the next reader to find, a nod to the histories and futures of books as objects.

There Is A Certain Kind Of Light that You Can See Too Much Of

When I was a child my dad worked on machines that measured the flow of natural gas through pipelines. Similar to how mercury was once used in thermometers, the machines used mercury to measure the pressure in the pipelines. When the pressure changed, the mercury would move and the machine would move and a little pen would mark the movement on a piece of paper. Sometimes the machines would leak tiny amounts of mercury causing the machine to become inaccurate. My dad would fix the leak and replace the lost mercury and re-calibrate the machine. The field office where my dad worked had a special drain in the floor that was designed to collect mercury that fell out of the machines when they were brought in for repair. One time my father brought some mercury home, and my brother and I were allowed to play with the tiny balls of liquid metal. We pushed the beads around on our kitchen table. We could see our faces stretched out over the surface of the poisonous metal as our fingers prodded these little round mirrors.

*

From the silver, mirror-like cover, to the use of symbols and glyphs, Mercury, by Ariana Reines, is a work of great design. It is divided into five sections:

LEAVES
SAVE THE WORLD
WHEN I LOOKED AT YOUR COCK MY IMAGINATION DIED
MERCURY
0

Each section possesses a unique form and content, but they are made of the same reflective material (like a liquid taking the shape of its container). A large part of the pleasure of Mercury comes from its slipperiness of form, style, and content all enacting its namesake.

Mercury’s poems show, on their surface, the face of the reader and the writer, but intrinsically they have properties that tell much more about our world and the pressures of its people. I know this sounds like a grand, ambitious, and reaching statement, but Mercury is a grand, ambitious, and reaching book of poems. Every edge of Mercury oozes our desires and flashes our excesses back at ourselves while emitting ancient logic and radiating some secret religion from inside its amorphous substance. This quality is best exemplified in the poem, “Baraka”:

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MEXICO TO CONQUER AMERICAN

…

I CAN’T WAIT TO GROW THE DECAPITATED FLOWER

I CAN’T WAIT FOR UPENDED PIGEONS

REVERSED RAINBOWS AND SNAKE-EATING LIQUID GOLD

I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE DEW TO FALL, TOMORROW, TODAY

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY TITS AND ABS

I CAN’T FOR THEY WON’T GO WHEN I GO

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY HIGH ASS AND MAC MOUTH

I CAN’T WAIT FOR A THICKER COCK

I CAN’T WAIT FOR A MODEST APARTMENT UNDER THE HOLE IN THE ROOF OF THE PANTHEON

“Baraka,” like the rest of Mercury, is equal parts shamanistic chant and confessional purge. Reines’s confessional lyrics are a spectacle created for the reader. The spectacle of Mercury ranges from internet porn and contemporary film, to discussions of the apocalypse with the sun (referred to as ‘lord’ in the poem “Truth or Consequences”) brought about by the lack of cattle roaming the surface of the earth. All of it through a fairly consistent first-person speaker who compulsively divulges everything. Reines’s speaker is also very aware of this spectacle being performed for the reader. She often points out the reader’s voyeurism at the peak of the spectacle:

You just texted me two cock pics

It used to be more artful

The way you did it, the composition.

Like last week, it just stopped raining.

I have a cold quicksilver feeling.

I could put this in a place where you could find it

But I’m hiding it here.

In moments like these, you realize that you are not just watching the poet watch someone else, but you’re watching the poet watch you watching her watch someone else, like an elaborate set-up of two-way mirrors and video cameras. The voyeuristic element of Mercury pushes the lyric beyond confession to exhibition: this isn’t the real, this is a performance. Even if the sex in “WHEN I SAW YOUR COCK MY IMAGINATION DIED,” the most graphic section of Mercury, is “real” or “true” it was still performed as if it was pornographic film:

“when i get your cock like a bag my face is scarred i make my nails long around your cock that goes in and your balls jump fast like a dirt sack hop hop to her pussy like a pink gum crusted with durt”

*

“It is more important to affirm the least sincere,” Frank O’Hara writes in Meditations in an Emergency. Ariana Reines must have been taking this to heart as she was composing Mercury, because like O’Hara does in Meditations, Reines endears us to the least sincere. Like the little pools of metal across my table as a child, the lyrics of Mercury roll around inside my head, and over my tongue, knowing its ability to get through my pores.