Yo, this is a somewhat esoteric request, but: do any of you know of any periodicals that a/ publish poetry about queer and trans stuff; b/ (poetry that is actually good); c/ don’t have overwhelmingly lousy politics?

(whoa I just found out I have a tag called “i care about poetry so hard!!!” — I should use that more often)

I feel like they should exist and like I want to look at them (I generally prefer reading lots of people’s work in a lump to, say, zines by one single author), but Google is not helping me?

Sparrow

"A Testimonial"

I have lived in this city
25 years
and all that time
I have dropped things.
I’ve dropped
tissues,
letters from women
in Santa Fe, N.M.,
money,
the keys to my house,
books by
Jacques Prevert.
And all this time,
you,
the people of this
city, have pointed
to me, and said,
“Hey!” “Sir!” “You!
You dropped something!”
and then I’ve picked it up.
You have watched
over me all these
years,
and I’ve waited till
now to thank you.

see?

Straight poem
Feminist poem
Vintage poem
Mainstream poem
Pay-per-view poem
Softcore poem
Amateur poem
Poem star

Epic porn
Triadic-line porn
Elegiac porn
Nonsense porn
Gnomic porn
Country house porn
Epistolary porn
Anagrammatic porn

Five Marks of Oft-Rejected Poems

This is great:

Hook me, flatten me, fuck me out of my senses with your first line. It should be one of the best lines of the poem.

I’m not a minimalist by any means, but I do believe in earning your fireworks. Your winter breath is not a constellation of fireflies axeing their way through the winter like little lumberjacks. There’s not a hot air balloon filled with jackrabbits in your chest every time she looks at you like a prison guard bleeding sugar. I don’t care that it’s Tuesday. A poem ought to be, I think, more than just a collection of assorted images. What is your poem doing? What does it add up to? How is it governed?

wow:

Cowper wrote a poem in praise of halibut, or himself, concluding:

Thy lot thy brethren of the slimey fin
Would envy, could they know that thou wast doomed
To feed a bard and to be prais’d in verse.

Observed critic Ivor Brown over a century later: “The notion of fish pining to become the raw material of indifferent, or even of the best, poetry and to serve as the sustenance of human authorship is one which is beyond comment.”

(from British Literary Anecdotes, Robert Hendrickson. man I love anecdote books.)

Levinas says “Magic, recognized everywhere as the devil’s part, enjoys an incomprehensible tolerance in poetry.” As far as I can tell, he’s pretty serious about believing this, but he ends up making both magic and poetry sound really cool.

This higher plane is the sphere of significant imagination, of relevant fiction… Poetry raised to its highest power is then identical with religion grasped in its inmost truth; at their point of union both reach their utmost purity and beneficence, for then poetry loses its frivolity and ceases to demoralize, while religion surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive.

—George Santayana

Themes that teenage writers of love poems typically fail to explore

  • Having to ask “Is this a date?”
  • Safe words.
  • People worrying about the taste of the inside of their mouths.
  • People knowing perfectly well that when they graduate middle school, and maybe before that!!, this will be over.
  • The realization that maybe not everyone else in the world has such high standards for your appearance as YOU set for your own appearance.
  • “We broke up, but I guess I can live with that.”
  • “I can’t attain [this person], but I guess I can live with that.”
  • What exactly in the brain is going on to make people feel this way? Like, what are the neurotransmitters that cause this sensation?
  • If you’re cuddling with somebody, or whatever, and you’re accounting for the position of their body as well as the position of yours, so even though you’re getting a little uncomfortable and there’s a little crick in your neck, you don’t move.
  • Maybe knowing that someone else’s feelings about YOU are as weird (or dizzy or pleasing or obsessive or non-fault-finding) as your feelings about THEM.
  • That thing that happens when
    • an acquaintance says or does something towards you that you think is flirtatious,
    • but you realize that you don’t yet know this person very well,
    • and you can’t tell whether or not the gesture was just friendly.
    • So you keep your face shut.
  • WHY the writer is in love with the partner.

This last part is the oddest to me; I was sort of joking about most of the others, but in the poetry I read at my job, nobody ever talks about the personalities of their boyfriends or girlfriends in any interesting detail. It’s always “I love him/her so much” or maybe a “He tells me I’m pretty” or something. “She’s got nice eyes.”

It’s almost never anything like, “I was really impressed/fascinated/touched by this person’s (room decor / saxophone improv / obvious intellectual genius / massive afro / cooking prowess).”

I would read the shit out of a love poem like that. I mean I might not publish it but I’d read the shit out of it before I threw it away.