Aux.

  Ian Dreiblatt forget thee | Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021 Basil Bunting wrote: To appreciate present conditions/ collate them with those of antiquity. Indeed, there are a lot of analogues in our world to the ancient: our worship of icons as gods, our worship of artistic as well as military feats, and perhaps most of all in the way we value owning your opponent.  Ian Dreiblatt, presumably no Internet troll, is adept at a more sensitive task: that of delineating modern/ancient dialectics, most markedly thru a series of dialogues with ancient figures, in an untitled sequence of lyrics which makes up the center of forget thee . We see that these teleported mythical figures wonder about our world with just as much seemingly innocent curiosity as we do about theirs.           what did you do for           fun, I ask her, drank           actual milk with actual      honey in it in the shade     by a river, she tells me,     is it any wonder our      preoccupations were w

Blogs are kind of weird now. In the first part of this century, they were very common. They covered every imaginable topic and there numbers were voluminous, being a ‘democratization’ of discourse. They were used as diaries and as places to review movies. They were used as places to put recipes, or to put motorcycle reviews, and motorcycle news. Celebrity gossip. Personal beefs. Now all of that discourse, or most of it, has been sunk into social media. Social media has innovated its own forms and peculiar prosody, but its also a more interactive and much more sophisticated form of surveillance than blogs ever were. Blogs now are seen as largely outmoded. People whether in the arts or politics or whatever speak in the past tense of when blogs were of consequence, ‘back in the oughts’ etc. ‘Back in the days of Silliman’s Blog and K-punk’ etc. It feels weird to start a blog now, but I want somewhere to put writing that isn’t in anyone’s feed. I’ve done blogs before, one that was called Un

  The poetry in Jean Day’s latest is funny and biting, and also disorienting in a useful way. The reader will recognize the clusterfuck of signifiers at reference in LATE HUMAN as the same ones they daily navigate and, as we are dealing with Day’s particular kind of subtly acid wit, a sharp but empathic mind organizes and sounds out the contradictions. It’s a book that is altogether of the world the author lives in, but also more than that. Life feels altogether atomized, and can poetry do anything against it? It can be poetry,  a welter of possibilities, or a litany of sensations, truth told slant, or taking off the top of our heads, leaving us with a sense of new ways for living on this planet. But it can’t singlehandedly topple regimes, feed striking workers, or empower the oppressed. One thing we know poetry can do is help us draw together something like a representation of our material and spiritual existence. Jean Day here uses a fine-toothed presentiment to suss out the partic