Eleven poems

Eleven poems posted at three ezines in January. Ten of the poems are from a series I informally call “The Moe Poems” as I titled the poems after lines snipped from the poems of H. D. Moe, a longtime Bay Area poet whose poems fascinate and exasperate me. The poems themselves were written without reference to Moe’s work. I only thought his lines would interact fruitfully with mine after I’d already written mine. I wrote these poems in 2016, the initial versions at least. Revisions were somewhat influenced by H. D. Moe, mostly in that I used his inventiveness as goad to push myself further. The other poem is from another series, a batch of poems I built from titles I found in the database of the UC Berkeley library back when I as a student employee there in 1992 - 93. 

Five from the Moe Poems appear in Mannequin Haus, issue 10.2 (see under Glenn Ingersoll):

“mistaken for its own virginity”
“feel velvet before it becomes felt”
“heapbig approximate paradox gypsy of the rain”
“your light bulb in the egg-beat of a telephone crocodile”
“a waterfall that thinks it’s machine”

Five more from the Moe Poems appear in The Opiate. Each gets its own link, its own page, and its own image. The images were all chosen by editor Genna Rivieccio. She didn’t preview the images for me so I got to be surprised. Friends have said they think she chose well.

“needled into wanting”
“where cliffs are books, their titles deep in the mountains”
“fucked hollow by green banana dollars”
”we’re always new, impossibly repeating”
”life expands up to its panda bear”

And finally there’s the UC Berkeley library found poem which appears in the January issue of Neologism Poetry Journal:

“I Saw You from Afar”