There are thirteen mildly undulating ways, revenge that
Rests in different shades of clotted blood along a row.
Like spoons dipped, alternating chocolate and peanut butter,
As they darken, sugar browning at the air, in turn. And so:
We choose just one, a possible, of many possibles. The practical:
To understand your victim, note his mores, forget his values.
Put up pornographic postcards. Make the brownies:
Pulverize the weed electric in a coffee-grinder.
Leave the peanut-butter chipped concoction by a likely choice:
Imported Slavic princess, legs agape and smiling,
Down, the other papered face inscribed with something
Eerily malevolent. Don't bother. His ballooned and breasted girlfriend
Breathes the dark, ignores the blatancy of pussy. Know:
She'll eat the fucking thing, and wander down the stairs
Unsandalled, and remember, in the vaguely pulsing pleasure of her daze
She'll vomit on the couch and wreck the velvet with the contents.
Accourding to Kerry Sherin:
From: ksherin@dept.english.upenn.edu (Kerry Sherin)
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 14:32:37 -0400 (EDT)
Phew! I enjoyed the visceral detail -- even the vomit -- then worried for
a moment about the WH green couch! Could it be that there's tension among
the toommates?
--Kerry
Accourding to Mike Magee:
From: mmagee@dept.english.upenn.edu (Michael Magee)
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 08:05:43 -0400 (EDT)
I was intrigued by this poem too. Like the long lines - curious because
not Whitmanian/Ginsburgian; they're mostly composed of iambs ("To
understand your victim, note his mores" - that could be Pope) but they're
length foils our expectation that they should be pentameter (or at most 12
syllable Alexandrines) instead of stretching, at their longest, to 17
syllables. When the iambic line is combined with content incongruous with
our sense of that orderly mode, as in
"the dark, ignores the blatancy of pussy. Know:"
or
"She'll eat the fucking thing, and wander down the stairs"
we get something close to Marilyn Hacker, not to the poems detriment. A
pretty interesting tension. I like the idea of stretching the iambic line
to an almost absurd length - maybe 25 sylables or so, to see if it can be
sustained and at what cost. Anyway, thanks for this Hannah!
-Mike.
Accourding to Kirsten Thorpe:
From: thorpe@sas.upenn.edu (Kirsten L Thorpe)
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 14:37:59 -0400 (EDT)
jeez. i've got nothing really constructive to say yet. just that i loved
this.
k.
Accourding to Luke Szyrmer:
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 10:17:24 -0400
From: Luke Szyrmer
Wow! I like how dramatic tension results from the piece's lyricism.
--Luke.