1.12.2010

A Selection of "Faiku" from Linda Russo



What better way to begin 2010 than with some Steinian gems from Linda Russo. Linda calls these compressed investigations "faiku." About them she writes,


These little poems go with anything, and they're fun to make.
I usually write 5-6 with the same title in one sitting.
Like piecework with language - slightly different details,
sublty formal variation: fortune-cookie, aphorism, fake haiku, etc.


Enjoy, and perhaps, then, try some yourself.


comparative competitiveness

will you make up for my feelings of inferiority?
forming a curve and crossfertilizing freely


comparative competitiveness

we breed men
we respond to this breed of men with ceremonies


evacuation evermore

take refuge and answer directly
dissipate directly, like vapor
sugar-adding rituals and sea water


improvable inadequateness

falsely or unjustly located inside
in a position of power


lose ground love

the carrot is a remedy
warm-blooded, juicy
attracting respect and
living in the dreamy indolence of revolution

lose ground love

puzzled by affection, baseball, picking variously covered petals
bearing this fruit


o object

to propel as if by basic decoration
is a kind of progress


o object

use a connective cake carelessly
you will observe it is not binding




Linda Russo is the author of Mirth (Chax Press, 2007) and o going out (Potes & Poets, 1999). Her essay “Precious, Rare, and Mundane” serves as preface to Joanne Kyger’s About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 2007). A graduate of the Poetics Program, at SUNY Buffalo, she lives and teaches in Pullman, Washington.


If you'd like to find more of Linda's work online, here are some links to some of her poetry and scholarly work.

Linda on Joanne Kyger in Jacket Magazine HERE

See Jacket Magazine for a selection of 8 poems from Russo's book Mirth.

Click HERE for Linda's "Writing Within: Notes on Ecopoetics as Spatial Practice" in the journal HOW2

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