WE TAKE A BREAK from our fiction experiments in the New Pop Lit laboratories to present Three New Poems by a poetic practitioner from Pennsylvania, Luke Kuzmish. The poems touch on subjects as diverse as drug use, Charles Bukowski and Wall Street. (A Wall Street bar, but still.) We hope you enjoy them.
the kind of pills
to fix the problems
they don’t tell you about
in welfare rehabs
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(Art: “Painting” by Patrick Henry Bruce.)
WE’VE NOTICED that some literary people like to put other writers into a niche. Such as, “Exactly what kind of poet are you? Are you a flarf poet or an Instapoet or a beat poet, or a trad, or a lake poet, or Elizabethan or Edwardian, or maybe Victorian, modernist or hip-hop, or really, what kind of poet after all do you claim to be what box can we put you in how do we classify you, where can we put you to shorthand you, dismiss you, or otherwise find some way to short circuit our brains so we don’t have to THINK?”
(It’s a variation on labeling everyone according to party or politics: Wear the proper name tag and don’t ever switch sides or change beliefs.)
Which is a roundabout way of saying we have more poetry today, “‘That’ll do, Pig’ and Two Other Poems” by James D. Casey IV, who claims to write every kind of poem, and based on the evidence he’s provided, we believe him. Three poems. Hope you like them.
I’ve dreamt of hunting
vampires with Bukowski
and getting in barfights
with Hemingway and dodging
bats with Thompson and being
lost in the desert with Jim
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ON OTHER FRONTS, we have a book review of a short (four stories) short story collection by talented story writer Elizabeth Sims— and:
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WE CONTINUE to ask questions at our NPL News blog about whether or not the short story form needs to change– we strongly believe it does– as we lay the groundwork for the coming release of our solution: the Three-Dimensional Story. A lot going on.
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(Art: “”Simultaneous Windows” by Robert Delaunay; “The Architect” by Roger de la Fresnaye; “The Bargeman” by Fernand Leger.)
WHILE our main focus for the first half of 2019 will be discussing how to remake the short story, we’ll continue to present, on occasion, significant new poetry.
Our mission at New Pop Lit is to find the best, develop the best, present the best in the best possible light and promote that presentation.
Toward that end we bring back poet C. A. Shoultz with “The Valley”— a foray into nature, into a forest devastated, devoured by civilization, but maybe not all the way. We trust you’ll enjoy the images, the cadences– and the punchline.
Without the roots of trees, the ground had run,
And had become a mass of bare brown mud.
I saw a twist of roots that had been pulled,
Now lying like some tangled corpses’ limbs.
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(WE’LL be presenting much more poetry this month: from southern poet James D. Casey IV; from new talent Kai Warmoth; and last-but-not-least from iconic Philadelphia wordmaster Frank D. Walsh, who has every tool in the poet’s toolbox at his disposal. Will Frank’s work live up to his rep? We’ll find out.)
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(Art: Mont Sainte Victoire by Paul Cezanne: bottom: “Urizen in Chains by William Blake.)
New Pop Lit 