Did you ever feel like you were on a wild goose chase? I do. You see, I thought I had a whole poem in my hands and then I found parts of it elsewhere with messages that read: if you want to read the rest, you'll have to buy something.

http://areasneaks.com/index.php?id=11

And then what?

Billy Mays is dead. Let's channel him and see what the pitch might sound like eh?

More available work from K. Lorraine Graham here including this

Once again, we have a poem or portion of a poem "from" In a Supralunar World. Okay. Darla Whitehead who has written many poems with various citations like "From the Warnings" and likewise other disingenous and wholly fictional books, some not yet published like "From the Land of the Infidels"......although Darla (whom I've known for many, many years) would say that the title of a piece isn't the same as it's fictional citation. They function in two wholly different ways and do so in order to encourage the reader to think a little beyond the title of the poem and the poem itself. To think about the context of the poem and the poet (dual identity poet).

In this case, all I am thinking about is ....well...nothing. Supralunar and I see, Supraulnar instead and then I'm not quite sure what I am talking about. But that's okay because neither does the poem.

The last line appears and may or may not be the last line, my guess is as good as anyone's:

It is good to be a poet on the way to the office of the censor,
where one can read all periodicals

I'm afraid this one too get's a C minus at best. But not to forget that this is effort free, value free, free free poetry that escapes the poetry radar as long as it insinuates line breaks and argh! that awful crutch poets often use "early" in their careers, the Part I, Part II, Part III technique of stringing together widely disparate thoughts that are merely connected because the poet commands the reader to connect them:



I

More & more now no one

speaks----but
I say “no one speaks.”
This style is a style, not something
imagined

this style says something she said:
“I like your style”
then said something
----

“Those plucky girls upset the roman emperor.”

“Plucky girls.”


That is the first er...stanza if you will. "This style is a style, not something imagined" No...it is imagined and if it isn't, it is borrowed. It isn't innovative nor witty nor even linguistically inviting to me. The surprises are dull if you can call them surprises like the naked girl in the forest and the many references to girl body parts in the poem Supraulnar, Supralunar. If this is an inside joke, it is mediocre anatomy at best. The desperate plea to be recognized as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (the secret life of the explanation mark comes to mind) is obvious:

The nouns shall woo you They shall be wooed

I am most definitely not woo'd but feeling a bit wooden all the same. That letters, syllables, phrases or gosh, punctuation marks function on their own, justify their existence in a poem is a bit incredible to me in a field in which one famous poet declared that he sometimes spent an entire afternoon changing the word "and" for "the" and agonizing over it like the loved ones of a brain dead patient in an ICU. Anyone who thinks otherwise about poetry doesn't understand poetry, SoQ or not. Poetry IS about the words, letters, gaps, dashes and long white spaces that somehow through an evil trickery of the poet, take shape in alarming or expected ways. It has been about that ever since the typewriter and abundance of paper products allowed it to be about that. In the days of Stone Tablets, such luxuries no doubt came to mind but were simply not "do-able".

There's a story I'm thinking of now....about a young adulterous in a muslim country who is followed by her husband's brothers....the story unfolds but I'll not say how because...that IS the story.

You see? The cinema...movies like 21 Grams have not only changed the way we view a story but the way we think about the disjointed matters of everyday life, the "we" being Joe Plumber. A muslim would tell you....the signs. They make great stories and poems but even the disjointed is connected in the "spooky" world of the unseen where this poet somehow hopes to will herself to be engaged in.

Every chaos is a new type of order but this poetry of K Lorraine Graham (thus far looked at) is just chaos.




On Cole Avenue

I keep worrying about setting
my own back yard on fire,
keep thinking about the psycho
somatic differential involved
when an ash turns the new sweater
into holes.

These are true stories
about a girl in the back yard
about the back yard itself
about the particles seen
in the afternoon sun
where the sweater turns
in-to the holes.