Thursday, September 25, 2008

No Posit Post

The new No Posit that I was just reading is really good. It's so brilliantly plain.

The first sentence to J.A. Tyler's story goes, "He is yelling about something that has relatively little to do with pizza." The story is called "Pushing and Shoving as People Do." The next few sentences are delightfully bewildering. They go, "Fucking pepperoni. Fucking crust. Fucking sauce from a can. And she is instead of yelling back drowning garlic with welts of tears that drip miserably down an always unnoticed face."

I failed grammar but I know that what JA Tyler has done here is completely unacceptable. It's not even an incomplete sentence. It's like three fragments in one. See me after class. (I just realized that the idiosyncracy comes from omitted commas around the dependent clause "instead of yelling back." Oops!)

Zachary German's untitled poem is about public transit ethics. It answered a question for me, since I've been riding the bus more often. I would have given the poem a title something like, "How to Be a Magnanimous Boner."

Speaking of boner, there is a really good poem called "Moby Dick" by Jason Bredle. I mean, it's fantastic. It's the sort of poem I like to read. At first it keeps morphing my expectations with each new line. Then at the end it morphs my expectations again in a profound and sad way. I recommend this poem to people who are reading this.

What is it about making something in literature unexpected? It's what all the journals are looking for. Surprise us! The most common response to everything I work hard at in art is that something wasn't what the audience expected. Once I asked a friend what he meant when he said my piece was surprising and he said, "It was better than I thought it would be." I feel good and bad about that. Another time I asked a friend what he meant and he said, "The rhymes were in different places that I thought they would be." I asked a professor what he thought once and he said that my writing is more difficult than others's writing because he kept having to shift his expectations.

Anyway, No Posit. Joseph Goosey has it worse than I do. His poem is called "A Free, Over the Phone Consultation," and it's about how whenever he submits his poetry editors expect him to be insane.

Mike Young never fails to impress. This time, he doesn't fail to impress with these words, from "The Trip All Whoppy Jawed": "Eggs white people like." Move the s and I would still would have been surprised. On a personal note, I don't care for eggs.

The two words "THEN" look wonky in the title to Matthew Savoca's last poem! You should see it! And the poem is about a clever thing that I have never done but will probably do now. I'm going to Milwaukee tomorrow. How long till tomorrow? The same time ago as yesterday was. Dang, that was easy. Thank you Matthew Savoca!

Hey, now I'm live-blogging my No Posit reading experience because it's so good. I'm going to stop doing that though.


BlogSloth said...

eggs are chicken coffins. I spleen them.

blake butler is a beer bottle.

j. a. tyler said...

grammar & I had a big fight years ago. she is still upset. I sleep on the couch now.

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