AWP 2018 Panel "Semiformal" Accepted!!!!

Delighted to announce that my proposal, "Semiformal: Hybrid Formal Poetry and Free Verse" has been accepted as a panel at the 2018 Association of Writers and Writers Programs Conference in Tampa. Panelists are Timothy Liu, Marc Vincenz, Dean Kostos, Elizabeth Hodges and yours truly.

Here is our program:
Between the polarities of free and formal verse is a spectrum of hybrid poetry that utilizes the  treasures of both: inventiveness, innovative structures, rhyme and rhythm. This panel will present and analyze such hybrid poems, classic and contemporary, including work by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Patricia Smith, and Claudia Rankine. We will "out" free verse poets in their use of formal elements, discovering their metric codes, and discuss the impact of free verse on the evolution of form.

Hope to see you in Tampa!

Trump and his strongman friends

Donald Trump has no interest in being president; he wants to be dictator. His favorite leaders are Putin, Duterte, Erdogan - he even called Kim Jong Un a "smart cookie" for killing his uncle. He is addicted to public acclaim and to belittling people. Do you really think he will give up power legally, peaceably? Don't you think Bannon has planned the coup already? Putin will happily pay for it. #neverTrump

While you are watching the Mooch . . .

While you are watching the Mooch, Trump is crippling, or trying to cripple, his opposition; gays now have to fight new job discrimination, transgenders to stay in the armed forces, Muslims to travel, Latinos to fight deportation of their families. Trump and Bannon will keep us all busy so that we can't resist. And we won't get any news because we'll all be watching the Mooch. 
People don't get it. The White House doesn't care about White House things, health care, etc. They give the appearance of disorder, but when it comes to power grabbing, they are 100 percent organized. They are lining up the most reactionary cops and military, inciting race hatred, and are positioned to deport any of us in a moment. THEY ARE VERY ORGANIZED

Blow-by-Blow: My Beating as a Psychiatric Patient at Mount Sinai Hospital

Thanks to Jonathan Penton and Unlikely Stories Mark V for publishing this piece..http://www.unlikelystories.org/content/blow-by-blow

 2014, October, close to Halloween: A brain-shaking blow to my left-temple, then one to my right.

It was a bad episode, unexpected; I hadn’t been in a hospital for bipolar disorder since 1997. The last thing I remember before coming to at Mount Sinai was lying on my belly on the floor of my bedroom, surrounded by five cops, enormous from my vantage point. They talked among themselves and on their radios, ignoring me. Finally, they cuffed me behind my back; I begged them to tell me what I had done, but I was not worth a word.

I don’t remember my first two days at Mount Sinai; when I did come to, they were giving me Haldol, which gave me horrible dyskinesia, an unbearable restlessness in the legs, arms, and mouth. I did not realize that the incorrect medication was the cause of my discomfort; I thought this was part of my episode, and didn’t tell the doctors as they rushed by, trying to avoid the patients.

How did I get into the empty room with the orderly?

It was night. He led me into the room. He told me to sit down on the bed. He then drew his arm back and gave me two powerful, calculated blows with the palm of his hand against my temples, first left, then right. Something practiced about the beating, as though he knew this would leave no marks, only unconsciousness or concussion. I remained conscious. I saw a thick jagged scar on the length of his arm, from inches below his armpit to inches below the elbow crease, stitched broadly.

“Lie down,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I quietly replied. He left, and I lay my head on a bare pillow, and wished, willed myself to die.

I would see the orderly often on the ward. I had no clothing and the hospital uniform stretched in embarrassing gaps across my obese form. And the Haldol was causing horrible twitching, a torture of restless limbs. Could I have imagined the beating? No.

I approached a nurse to ask his name. Before I could say a word, she exclaimed, “You are not the same person that came in! You were horrible.”

This is your fault, the staff seemed to say; not sick, murmured the walls, bad. What was his name? I was afraid to ask.

He took my blood pressure, even gave me meds. “You were horrible, inhuman, bad,” his co-workers said. Yes, people like you should be beaten, thrown to the floor, cuffed. We are saints who love the damaged like you.

Indeed, I was subhuman in my uniform and with my twitching limbs. I did something to the orderly, that was it! I finally got the courage to ask him.

“You spilt on my shirt.”

Oh.

Emboldened, I asked him about the scar. He laughed wildly and said he was crazy when young. From Queens or Qatar? What planet do such men come from?

A few days later on the ward, a senior psychiatrist who knew I was a writer asked me to speak to her students about Otto Kernberg’s borderline personality diagnosis, ordinarily a favorite subject of mine. “They don’t know,” she said, pointing to the residents.

I haltingly tried to describe Kernberg’s theory of introjects in the borderline personality, cornerstone of that useless and damning label; all the “borderline” needs to do is to treat her addictions, food, drugs, sex, codependence, and the “instability” and “psychotic episodes” disappear. But I was too conscious of my ill-fitting uniform, and mumbled an excuse; the residents were deprived of their show, the patient who has read psychology.

When I was released, I related the events surrounding my beating to two therapists at the Karen Horney Clinic, later, to two residents at Payne Whitney. They stared into space, smiled, changed the subject. Because I am mentally ill, I don’t have perceptions, sensations, memories. More, their silence seemed to say, because I am mentally ill I can be abused, beaten with impunity, and my caregivers don’t have to care. I must have medication and this treatment is paid for by my insurance, so I let it go. But it comes back, often.

I have tried to forget this episode, go along with the clinicians who ignore a patient being beaten, and cannot. Fat and mentally ill, I have evoked new heights of condescension from mental health workers who find it easier to talk of mechanics, medication up or down, calories to consume. Meanwhile, Long Scar and his ilk continue to offer their “treatments” in mental hospitals everywhere. Some have said, and will continue to say, that people like me had it coming. All I can do is breathe, rest, and speak my truth until someone listens.

"I am not your insect" prose poem in The Bug Book anthology

I am very pleased that my poem, "I am not your insect," appears in the new creepy-crawly anthology, The Bug Book (Poets Wear Prada). Thanks to editor/publisher Roxanne Hoffman.

I am not your insect

Your underfoot, your exterminated, your bug. My unabashedly hairy legs, whose gymnopédies twitch like a chorus for a fatal Sharon Stone, delight in ces mouvements qui déplace les lignes, in the motion, the quiver, the mort, the catch. Mother Kali, you have made me what I am: feminine, brilliant, entirely without fear. Like my mother, I watch and pray for  prey—that it be there, that it give gore, that I feel it die, that there be more.

Poem in Lorca anthology Verde que te quiero verde

Delighted that the second edition of Verde que te quiero verde: Poems after Federico Garcia Lorca is now out with my poem, "To the Thanatos Within Me," in it! (text below). Thanks to the editors!

TO THE THANATOS WITHIN ME

Dear friend of ferment,
who unearths the worms

that enrich this blissful human soil,
promising the end of eternal roil:

I embrace you, dear shadow,
my revelatory friend;

dear suicidal impulse; today
I dream of the parapets above

A la Vielle Russie, and
of splattering near the Plaza

where Woody Allen wooed young girls,
leaving a bit of me

on the Strand Bookstand,
near the park and the seals—

but this is too vibrant and real.

Better to find myself alone
in a porcelain tub

with chamomile bath oil . . .
(as if I needed to be calm;

there is eternity for that),
listening to Verdi’s Requiem,

holding a razor, or better still,
to poison myself with small

scored pills, avoiding arsenic
and the Bovary traps

of indigestion, detection;
best with caplets, red carafes

of wine or Guinness brew —
(who wouldn’t want to quaff a few?)

What catharsis there is in the dive,
the gesture, the infinite jest,

the slash, the brush (its own fire),
the dance with death?

Ah, this: as I flirt, you draw near,
chingon to my chingada

bite my ear, stop my breath—
who else could do that?

Te quiero, my Mescal, my absinthe,
my blue cyanosing corps, my Mayakovsky,

my you …

Was this a mistake? Is it too late… ?
You bite my ear, take up my rear, whisper:

Yes.

Dear Steve Bannon

Dear Steve Bannon:
Thank you so much for your letter. It is a comfort to know that President Trump is saving the white Christian orphans from Hillary Clinton's cannibalism. And thank you for Mr. Hitler's book. My daughter says it is poorly written, but she has become a real liberal elite since she came back from college. We look forward to reading Mr. Hitler's ideas about health care. And don't worry about the Jews: we understand that you have to deal with the Muslims first, so we will be patient. Oh, it is so good to finally have a president who is "one of us." MAGA and God bless parts of America!