my mo' favoriter        and mo' better        is my most favoritest

is mo' simpler this way        is mo' fluider         mo' wetter        most hottest

'cause the most beautifullest        is mo' beautifuller         mo' meaner

mo' flyer       and most flyest        mo' shyer       and the most shyest

is more than more intelligenter        than the panel's most ugliest

and most selectivest       is the most goodest        is the most burntest

is mo' burnter       and mo' unrulier       is the most meekest

and even mo' meeker        is the most ownablest       is mo' purchasabler

and the most purchased        thus       becomes the most purchasablest

                at the site of the most shiniest coins

my most funkiest       is also my most stolenest        but the most stolenest

can't ever be mo' funkier      than the most oldest        the most thievin'est

be the most brokest        cause the most thieved from        be the most oldest

so becomes       the most richest       who also be        the most fundedest

and that makes me        the most confusedest        when I'm in the most

keptest buildings        that be        mo' kepter        than all the most

time keepin'est kats        they keep in the back          up keepin' 'em.
from the book MUSCADINE / Four Way Books
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
A desire to speak through "error" fuels this poem. I stumbled into the poem's system, by mouthing as many adjectival forms as I could, with every combination of more and most attached. My question was how many times can I break this rule, while speaking through it clearly. It's become a kind of ode to what the tongue wants to do, in a linguistic environment that suggests it does otherwise.

A. H. Jerriod Avant on "Felonious States of Adjectival Excess Featuring Comparative and Superlative Forms"
Photo of Erin Marie Lynch and Cover of Her Collection, Removal Acts
"A Conversation with Erin Marie Lynch"

"While my work is indebted to many poets working within documentary poetics, I don't feel a documentarian's impulse to record, refract, reframe reality. But I am obsessed with the idea of the document itself: both the documents that shape the poem and the poem as a document, reshaping what is outside of it."

via HUNGER MOUNTAIN
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover of Annulet #2
What Sparks Poetry:
Robin Myers on Other Arts


"I stopped to watch a group of people doing something odd and beautiful together on a patch of dry grass. Was it a dance improvisation workshop? An actors' warm-up? I couldn't tell, but it felt special to see them doing it. They drifted around and moved their limbs, interacting sporadically with their surroundings and each other, in a way that felt both spontaneous and coordinated, both public and private. Both practiced and unfinished, even unfinishable. They used only their bodies, no language at all."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
donate
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2023 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency