2.
Make yourself
uncomfortable.

3.
What is it?
How many legs does it have?
Is it woody or chitinous?

4.
You are a cat.
No, not you—
you are nothing like a cat!
Help us find the cat.

5.
What would you tell time?
What would you read to books?

6.
Invent a ceremony for
the successful failure of an exam.

7.
Demonstrate molting.

What follows is most emphatically not a review; some of these lines relate only tangentially to Ren’s poems (which is why I don’t name the poems). But obviously it isn’t every book that so moves me to write and to remember.

(p. 1) The head of state, polished to a high sheen, is not the kind of god to submit to questioning.

(2) I remember $24.95 in saved allowance, dimes & quarters stacked on the counter of the camera store in exchange for that black box, my Instamatic! And taking a photo of my shadow beside the pigs.

(3) Grandma had a slingshot she used on the guinea fowl, those perpetually agitated gray commas.

(4) When Elvis died, I knew it was because he had maligned the innocent hounds.

(6) Going home from the pet store, the goldfish on the back seat beside me vibrated in its plastic bag of water. Three days later, it died of loneliness.

(7) The brutal screwing of Muscovy ducks in a muddy ditch was my introduction to reproduction: The enormous male crushing the female, pushing her head under the water, threading her with a white rope.

(8-9) I hated everything about shooting groundhogs, especially when their big soft bodies slid off the shovel or when, wounded, they escaped a second shot.

(11) Starting to drown in the ocean, that second or two of great silence under the waves — yet another project I didn’t finish.

(12) Out of all the days I’ve lived in blessed doubt, the two when I flirted with certainty were enough to make me burn forever.

(13) Behind the barn, behind the barn! The place where chicken-killing dogs were shot. There alone we could curse to our heart’s content.

(15) I measure my life in generations of 17-year cicadas, Brood X. I was 9 the first time. In a jar at the back of a drawer, I still have one or two of those transparent shells with exit wounds in lieu of wings.

(16) Clowning in the lunch room, he pulled the neck of a turtleneck shirt up over his head & in a matter of moments earned the nickname that would follow him to the grave.

(18) My brother yelled “copperhead!” when my foot was in mid-air & I launched into flight. That evening we found the reason why it couldn’t move, its shed skin.

(20) I once paid a statue to talk. She was loud with rust.

(21) In one well we had what we called a mudpuppy, but it was only a newt.

(22) Whoever invented the kaleidoscope must’ve had a childhood like mine: no TV, no visits to amusement parks, plenty of time to look at each odd thing from every angle.

(23) In the 4th Grade I learned that the body is made up of rooms too small to see. I was a city! And there were whole districts that never slept.

(24) We brought one runner sled, red as a red wagon, down with us from Maine in our red VW bus. In summer, we built mazes of tunnels through the tall grass.

(26) Our sky was narrow but dark then. I used to feel sorry for the light of distant stars that had been traveling so long just to enter my eye.

(27) The only thing about highways I didn’t hate was the shimmering water that wasn’t there, what it taught me about thirst.

(28) We had roosters, so our breakfast eggs were always fertile. I dreamt of chicks hatching in my stomach.

(29) Escaped garden plants have taken over half the forest. A curse is nothing but a blessing turned feral.

(30) If a bachelor dreams hard enough, he can give birth to a migraine.

(32) She left a letter with the stain of a dead centipede & several promises.

(34) Ah, romance. I remember corn silk, the wet trail of a slug.

(35) I remember scraping the roosts, nostrils burning with ammonia, and that big black rubber tub bulging with chickenshit.

(36) Feathers falling from the sky are commonplace. What seems incredible now is that Grandpa actually took up arms against a hawk. But Bontas must’ve all been like that once. We drank, we gambled, we owned other human beings, we shot hawks out of the sky.

(41) I was a gardener of little faith. When seedlings came up, I was astonished. I couldn’t bear to thin.

(43) The back of a shy man’s neck is red from scratching. You wouldn’t guess how I know.

(44) We keep calling them mountains, these hills, in the hope they’ll outgrow us.

(46) Birds from the tropics fly here every year to sing. Also to make new birds, yes — & teach them the songs they never sing in the tropics.

(47) Surely the near eradication of lice and fleas on humans has done our species a great disservice. Books & scrolls are a poor substitute for that daily close reading of each other’s primary texts.

(49) I learned early how to hold my breath: at the conference about my unruly behavior, the exophthalmic teacher waiting for me to speak. Strapped in for the orthodontist whose fat fingers tasted like garlic.

(52) Missing for most of my life, I remember being stoned and present for a mother who placed my hand on her child’s bare belly to feel the sickness — blood flukes, perhaps? — like a burl on a tree. I showed her my wallet, already emptied for other mendicants, & said nothing about the belt full of bills against my skin.

(53) We just can’t help stealing each other’s souls.

(54) No sane person looks forward to a trip. I look forward to having traveled.

(55) I miss the two or three male friends I used to open up to, our shared vulnerability over open beers, the layers of blue smoke that wreathed our heads.

(57) You might not believe it, but the part of a woman’s body I most miss touching is the back, below the shoulder blades & above the hips, that flat pastureland with its single ridge.

(58) Tiger beetles anywhere in the world turn my older brother into a predatory beast, one who stiffens, crouches, springs.

(60) That the wind signed its name on our fingertips before we were born — well, I call it wind. Some impersonal force random enough to convey uniqueness.

(63) The idea of the Sahara: not the shadow of civilization but its impact crater.

(64) I used to trace veins of quartz in the local bedrock; now it’s threads of moss that draw my eye. I have left off believing in heaven even as a metaphor. I am homesick for earth.

(65) Night/soil.

(66) Only nonsense can save us now.

(67-68) Garlic & mint, mint & garlic: I would join any church that had that for a catechism.

(69) The trailer where we went one by one for IQ testing at the age of six smelled of new machines & fear. I remember being told I could watch myself on television — a closed-circuit TV, but I didn’t know that. The dim realization that fun was being had at my expense.

(70) The Flavored Nuts sign — conveniently posted at shoulder level — remained a site for teenaged pilgrimage long after the factory closed and cloying smells stopped emanating from its windows.

(75) Like a single Roman letter stretching into a cursive sentence, the great blue heron launched into flight.

(76) Do peaches float? I feel I should know this, I who once publicly embarrassed the author of a book called Stones Don’t Float with a piece of pumice.

(77) A mother grouse doing the injured-wing act led me to the edge of a near-cliff. I wanted to see just what malice she harbored in her speckled breast.

(79) There’s a desert under my floor where rain hasn’t fallen in 150 years — it’s dry as the Atacama. A strange hairy people live there. I hear them thumping rhythmically and moaning now & then.

(80) Grandma was the only person I’ve ever helped bury. She was anti-religious & unsentimental and wanted to be cremated. It still felt awkward to tamp down the soil, hopping on her grave in tight funeral shoes.

(83) Across the gulf of puberty I catch only the faintest echo now of my childhood misery. I wonder though if my frequent, public self-baring wasn’t essential training for the vocation of poet.

(86-87) In a world with lichen in it, nothing is lost. The fungi are farmers, pioneering the most desolate faces of rock.

It might be useful, this heart-shaped hole: flying squirrels could use it to get out of the weather. In warmer months, spiders could spin webs in it. Caterpillars could pupate in it.

A true desert is difficult to maintain. Some scrap of life or impertinent piece of flotsam always shows up to mar the perfect bleakness. Your only option is to keep narrowing your field of vision, until at last you are all alone with your demons.

I’ve always felt a little sorry for the sun because it cannot cast a shadow.

What does it have to remind itself of its own eventual death?

What would the henge builders say about a god who never eats and a people who no longer believe in sacrifice?

What would the ancestors make of our craze for the living dead?

1. Is half a stone still a whole stone?
2. Do grains of sand get tired of being recycled into mountains?
3. If you crossed a bat with a mushroom, would you get an umbrella?
4. Do the glasses one wears in a dream require a prescription?
5. What songs do they sing in a school without windows?
6. Do the daisies love us or not?
7. Is there any reason to believe that we’ll have working mouthparts in the next life?
8. What kind of cartilage connects us to the stars?

Now the challenge is to find eight bloggers who might actually enjoy answering such questions. Let’s see. How about:

• Julia Martin at Clumps and Voids
• Siona at autobiology
• Dale at mole
• Deb Scott at Stoney Moss
• PF Anderson at Rosefire Rising
• Hannah Stephenson at The Storialist
• Peter at slow reads
• Sarah Sloat at The Rain in My Purse

Of course, being tagged in this fashion confers no obligation whatsoever, and anyone not on the list is also free to tackle the questions. Please leave a link to your answers in the comments.

What is this unrhymeable color? Is it really so difficult to live with?

What kind of fidelity does it require?

Does it start as a seed, like a carrot? Does it confer second sight?

Does it carry its hunger as we do, from sun to sun?

Why do the fire-worshippers call it red? Is it just superstition?

Can it pay in any other coin but its own?

In a world full of hazards, why can’t it hide?

What stops it from spreading to the sky?

Figure 1: a page from a treatise on poetics, via Google Books and HyperSnap 5.

Figure 2: a found poetics, via HyperSnap's eraser tool.

A reflection prompted by a found videopoem.

1.
When a warm thing becomes cold, and a cold warm
When anything moist becomes dry, or dry moist
When a small thing becomes bigger
When food turns into blood
When the limbs have their position altered
When, therefore, the animal has attained its complete size
When the matter that flows into each part of the body in the form of nutriment is being worked up into it
When the vapours have passed through the coats of the stomach and intestines
When this has been made quite clear
When the iron has another piece brought into contact with it
When a small body becomes entangeld with another small body
When our peasants are bringing corn from the country into the city in wagons

2.
Children take the bladders of pigs, fill them with air, and then rub them on ashes near the fire, so as to warm but not to injure them. This is a common game in the district of Ionia, and among not a few other nations. As they rub, they sing songs, to a certain measure, time, and rhythm, and all their words are an exhortation to the bladder to increase in size.

3.
Imagine the heart to be, at the beginning, so small as to differ in no respect from a millet-seed, or, if you will, a bean…

4.
Now, clearly, in these doings of the children, the more the interior cavity of the bladder increases in size, the thinner, necessarily, does its substance become

common to all kinds of motion is change

tangible distinctions are hardness and softness, viscosity, friability, lightness, heaviness, density, rarity, smoothness, roughness, thickness and thinness; all of these have been duly mentioned by Aristotle

Nature constructs bone, cartilage, nerve, membrane, ligament, vein, and so forth, at the first stage of the animal’s genesis

pain is common to all these conditions

please test this assertion first in the muscles themselves

5.
This also was unknown to Erasistratus, whom nothing escaped.

UPDATE: Here are the survey results as of noon, 1/21/10 (omitting the percentages of those who chose to skip the question):

Can a houseplant die of loneliness?

• 52 (72%) said Yes
• 11 (15%) said No
• 9 (13%) said What?

Do you see twelve different things through the eyes of twelve different needles?

• 35 (49%) said Yes
• 20 (28%) said No
• 20 (28%) said How did you know?

If mornings came with printed instructions, would anyone read them?

• 24 (34%) said Yes
• 30 (43%) said No
• 16 (23%) said All readings are misreadings

Have you ever torn all the paper from a spiral notebook, page by page, just to get an unobstructed look at the spiral?

• 16 (23%) said Yes
• 38 (54%) said No
• 17 (24%) said None of your beeswax

Will this be the year they start using prisons for captive breeding programs?

• 8 (11%) said Yes
• 28 (40%) said No
• 34 (49%) said Why? Lord knows, it’s not like prisoners are an endangered species

Wouldn’t a truly self-adhesive tape collapse like a star into a black hole?

• 20 (29%) said Yes
• 9 (13%) said No
• 41 (59%) said That’s setting a pretty high standard for adhesiveness, don’t you think?

Do you find it harder to think in a room where you can’t touch the ceiling?

• 10 (14%) said Yes
• 49 (71%) said No
• 10 (14%) said They don’t pay me enough to think

With our fondness for clichés, don’t we risk making the perfect storm the enemy of the good storm?

• 30 (43%) said Yes
• 6 (9%) said No
• 33 (48%) said Bad weather is better than no weather at all

If your name was Fritz Zwicky, wouldn’t you also prefer to be known as the Father of Dark Matter?

• 41 (60%) said Yes
• 13 (19%) said No
• 14 (21%) said Maybe, but I’m not sure I look good with a flying V guitar

If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?

• 8 (12%) said Yes
• 53 (77%) said No
• 8 (12%) said Only if I didn’t have to change my underwear

Note: Since this survey was open to all comers and not administered in a random fashion, the results are scientifically worthless. However, that doesn’t matter too much, since it was really a “push poll” for the Dadaist Party. Ketchup for Shah! U.S. out of North America! Etc.