Friday
Randall Mann
Is this a story
or a problem,
a colleague said.
I'm dead!
Which is to say,

living
for her shade.
I switch off
my face,
and chat

Sorry.
Having
issues.
Anything
but that . . .

I'm looking
to stream.
I settle on
I Killed My Mother.
Rotten Tomatoes'
pithy
description?
"A young homosexual
has problems
with his mother,"

which is also
every film ever
when I watch.
The first film
I ever saw

was Citizen Kane,
nice start but also
are you kidding,
a lesson
in all-

downhill-
from-here—
it was at the
Kentucky
Theatre,

a palace
with delicious
Orange Whip.
I was six.
The first

gay thing
I remember
other than
the longing
was seeing

Rock Hudson
on a stretcher
on the news.
I didn't know
I knew . . .

Have a great
weekend,
we end
our e-mails,
late in the day.

Great.
Like the
weekend,

modifiers
have a way

of taking us
farther
away:
the long
walk;

the afternoon
read.
Regret.
Marooned
on my shelves,

like Paul
Monette.
All
my ambititous
friends want

to talk about
is joy.
Oh boy:
The End.
Maybe that's

fire,
maybe satire—
so much rolls
off the tongue.
There is always

the distance
to revise.
Look how
I'm undoing
my own ruin

now.
from the book DEAL: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS / Copper Canyon Press
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"Friday" is one of those instances when what was on my mind at the time I was writing it—performative, suspect joy at work; performative, suspect joy in poems; my early moviegoing experience; and the ever-present grief of growing up under the pall of AIDS—all somehow came to together in a poem.
 
cover of So What by Frederick Seidel
Daisy Fried Reviews Frederick Seidel's So What

"Much of So What is as vigorous, insightful, moving and disturbing as his work has ever been: lots of politics, noise, luxury, literature, disease, war and strife. Lots of cancer, now, and the very aged body. Seidel has always written from and beyond his own predicaments, never attempting to disentangle his speakers from complicity, so that the world of his poetry remains healthily sick and appallingly delightful."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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What Sparks Poetry:
Alina Stefanescu on Language as Form

"Gaps are loud: they announce an absence. I love thinking about how absences are announced. In Wolf's lyric serialism, the fragments reveal their constraints: they recombine to offer a speaker starved of affection or tenderness. The absence is announced through sparsity. Other absences are announced through excess, as in accumulations of descriptions where the accretion reveals that something is missing."
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