Ariana Reines

I’ve been reading Ariana Reines lately. I am a regular-ish listener to Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm show and it was there I discovered Ariana Reines. (Listen to the show www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw080424ariana_reines, Ms. Reines gives a killer reading, though there is a fair amount of ‘bleeping’ - f*cking FCC!) Her latest work, the slender but whollup-packing “Coeur de Lion” amazes and delights and saddens and everything else, unfurling much like a Chinese Scroll Painting- show more linear in composition, but the mind is permitted to jump about. I just love this long poem because in it, like much of the Fine® Arts, one may glimpse the familiar, the sacred & profane, the un-shellacked lies and truths which abound in a naked, shitty world. It is a sort of working through the ending of a special relationship or love affair, richly told and unabashedly literate (now I’ve a whole new To-Read list, thanks to Ms. Reines work).

My sons girlfriend “A” discovered Ms. Reines previous book “The Cow” on my coffee table & was -to echo Peter Cook- ‘filled with inertia.’ So, I bought “A” a copy of “Coeur de Lion” and she really digs it.

Buy and read “Coeur de Lion” or pester your local lending library, they need support, too. show less

Have you ever been to a landfill? Once I went with my dad to a landfill. I was surprised that it was open to the public. Vultures wheeled overhead. We drove through mountains of trash until we got to this one place where you got to dump your shit, all while the sun baked it all into a perfect souffle of stink. We unloaded some unwanted furniture. As we were leaving, I noticed a dead horse in the bed of a truck. Three men were pushing the dead weight off their vehicle. The horse flopped off show more the truck like wet carpet, rolled a little ways before stopping.

How come this is not allowed to be exterior to the poem. Because the poem does not shoot out from a source it is of the world. While American poetry dissolved its I the starvational and massacred bodies of all the world larded newspapers with their blood

and guts. Shit. LYRIC. An integrity must come back to a body, and from thence, into a world, a world where a body can adore another one, or the sun, or a part of a thought under it, or the night. Maybe nobody wants to kill you because of what they think you are, or rape you, or treat you like a piece of shit. Maybe you don't need an I. An I's a dress literature can wear to be everything. Want to be infinity. Speaking but over yourself. Can a book carry you into the world you have to pretend doesn't exist most of the time, can a book carry you back out into what first made you alive.

To be laid open, metaphorically speaking is not enough, must be carried out literally. The need for a kind of connection through the splayed innards of the poet, a bodily connection where a spiritual connection is lacking or impossible because. It's 2011. Ariana's strategy is shock-cum-deadened-mass, and I admire her urgency, her good intentions. She wants her reader to become deadened in order to realize their already deadened state, so that they can begin the work of discarding the corpse. Having the corpse rejuvenated in a million forms, into the plastic we eat and the plastic we sit on.

INDUSTRY IS EVERYTHING

Sometimes I think if I can find a way to really feel my mere going could become as succor to the ruined women I love but it never does. The guilt of knowing the world's evil and still wanting to live in it.

JUST SAW OPEN AND SEE

That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten

END

The urgency to say the unsayable, but also that nothing is unsayable. That none of this is shocking, though so desparately wanting to be, is sad. So the unsayable takes the form of the unfashionable, the insensible, the silly, the personal (for the personal is the residue of shit, the casualty of lights). But extremities are absorbed into everydayness. We hear you not.

Where does life exist. What if everything could be as tender and durable as a genital.
I want to found a country where everybody feels.
Universes shooting out of matter so tiny you can feel it.
How to be liquid how to be gas how to be Freon, music, how to be flesh or inside of flesh that is living and how to be its equal, how not to be less than it, how not to divide the capital from the provinces, how to be. show less

Give up the habit of weeping for yourself, says the woman to the man with the malady of death in the novel by Marguerite Duras.

The sex parts of good books are usually the worst parts, that is too bad about good books.

Some bad books have good sex in them. And sex that I can see is somebody else's.

I want to have the sex that's mine, that sex that I have, okay.

Time to tell the difference between what's emitted and what's left over and what was there in the first place.

.

I pretty much devoured this book.