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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