RUCKSACK
Continue reading “Before Faking Your Own Death… by Paul Case”
A list poem is a litany of lines
A list poem is the sum of all its starts
A list poem listens to itself
A list poem lines up in more than one line
A listing poem protects itself historically
A list poem is recursively defined
A list poem never forgets its shopping Continue reading “List Poem by Mike Ferguson”
First Miracle
A burning log fell through the air like a ship, a plank
fell onto a field of black and tinged it blue.
If the field is a meadow, count its little black hairs,
if the field is a flag, count its violent stars.
Renounce all forms of sex unless it’s with a landscape.
Second Miracle
A blue snow arrives in a meaningless landscape.
It isn’t snow, it is a cloud of letters. Bloodhounds
pursue the letters through the whitening fields.
To kill something, say its name. No new sentences,
a gunshot remarks from the edge of the forest.
Anna primal like ma, da, stretched & mirrored in a lake of unwise Homo sapiens
Beatrice in Italian, a tenderness, caressed
California long, narrow, the n a pass momentarily freezing paradise
Diego weight of lead, syllabic four-way stop, digging into earth, Ray Harryhausen tortoise
Ebenezer bless you
Francine 50s bouffant skirt, pink Aqua Net smile, a bitter grit
Giovanni vibrating toes Continue reading “Book of Names by J.A. Pak”
author’s description
“Je l’élève sur mes pensées,
Et je vois éclore au milieu
De la fuite du cristal bleu,
Les feuilles des douleurs passées.”
― Maurice Maeterlinck “Verre Ardent” from ‘Serres Chaudes’, 1889“I hold the glass to my thoughts
and see in that crystal labyrinth
the petals of old pain bloom
as if they were not things of the past…”
― Maurice Maeterlinck ‘Serres Chaudes’, 1889 / “Burning-Glass” from ‘Hothouses’ translated by Richard Howard
Continue reading “Serres Chaudes, a series of visual poetry by hiromi suzuki”
A world with no lists.
Nothing is catalogued or ranked.
One
Thing
Does
Not
Come
After.
Above,
Below
Another.
(The general public’s attitude to poetry is a bit like it is with taxes – they have a sense there is something good about it, yet they still try to avoid it)
Don’t get sent down. Don’t stand on picket lines.
Don’t listen to Beyoncé’s Lemonade.
Keep away from aftermaths. Don’t teach.
Don’t have children, don’t have children
that teach. Keep off that Internet. Don’t
watch regal celebrations, war centenaries,
or Presidential inaugurations. Good luck
with christenings, weddings & funerals.
Keep your head down on the underground,
doctor’s or hipster cafés. Avoid canal boats,
gardens, community centres & play areas
as well as newsagents’ notice boards.
“I’m not one of these people, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut, there are some gay people that won’t like you comparing being bi to the same as being gay.”
Good observation. However, I specifically said non-heterosexual in my poem, or did that bewilder you? Besides, I thought it was LBGT? What do you ponder that B stands for?
darkness trying to claim us and i shivering and fuck me and wondering about everything in the world and i figuring it all wrong and tapping this shit out to make as much as i can of nothing or something into light so i can see it and if i can see it maybe i can bring it back with me when i leave here and my girlfriend wakes up and i am still talking to god with my hands up over my eyes cos fuck me the light is splitting my head into fragments and they are not speaking to each other and it’s like being in a fucking cathedral and the stained light is all over the bleeding place and she’s looking over me like i’m something else compared to what she was falling for
Continue reading “Two poems by Brendan McCormack”
The question of the contract is a secondary question that has come in the awareness of the fact that there are things to take account of – that these things as such are given to begin with. That the question is impossible to answer once for all may be acknowledged in considering the fact that the conception of the contract as the ground of that which is will necessarily exclude that it be given as a thing to take account of. Rather it is thought of as already left behind by the awareness of the presence of the debt that it has grounded – which includes this very thought about the contract.
The translation of the contract from one language to the next is an internal disposition of the contract to extend itself to any other region. There is not a single language that exclusively precedes its operation, but a limitless potential to express itself in language, and the languages in which it is expressed are untranslatable between them. Thus from world to world the words that would refer to the phenomena that presuppose the terms are not equatable constructions, and so cannot be transferred from any one to any other, unless it be by losing their significance – but the contract will allow for the expression of its terms in any language. It follows that there is no one authoritative translation to depend on.
Continue reading “Notes on the Translation of the Contract, by Christopher Clifton”
Burning House Press are excited to welcome Florence Lenaers as our first guest editor! Florence will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the full month of February – when she will then hand over the reins to our second guest editor for the month of March.
Submissions for Florence are open from today – 1st February and will remain open until 21st February.
Florence will be responding and publishing your submissions on a rolling basis during the month of February – and has chosen her three themes for submissions!
Her Themes are Languages, Letters, Lists. Continue reading “Submissions Are Open!!! from 1st Feb – until 21st Feb – for our first guest editor Florence Lenaers!!!”
From 1st February 2018 and for that whole month Burning House Press online will be edited by our very first guest editor – the amazing Florence Lenaers!
More info on submission details forthcoming – stay tuned – and a massive welcome to Florence to BHP!!! Prepare to send Florence your work…
For much of my life, I’ve written in a journal. In the last few years, I’ve almost exclusively started writing fragments. I’m interested in the possibility of the form, how it allows me to write in a compact way, to capture sudden revelations and epiphanies, to acknowledge the limits of language within its very structure. Because of trauma, my mind has been changed, my way of thinking has been altered. I often describe myself as “shattered.” Fragments are the physical manifestation of that shatteredness. It is language that is in shards, but the accumulation of those shards creates a new form, creates a whole where there was once an absence or just random bits and pieces. As Muriel Rukeyser once wrote in “The Poem as Mask“:
Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.
I see my own writing in that way. I am taking my brokenness and assembling my own ruins into something new, something that is still broken and cracked but alive. I view writing as a very personal act. I know other writers will have a different conception of writing, but this is mine. I want to articulate the wordlessness inside me. I want to speak the unspeakable. I want to write myself. I want to give voice to my alienation, grief, loneliness, fear, suffering, and trauma. I need to write these things not so that they will disappear or diminish–that is impossible–but so that I can bear them.
Continue reading “The Breathing Body in the Act of Creation: A Writing Experiment”
I’m an optimist with a shadow who pops in now and then
Just to let me know he’s still around.
He lies dormant like a bindweed vein in winter,
Waiting,
Watching for that glimmer of light
Always looming,
Anticipating his chance to make an entrance Continue reading “2 Poems by Fay Deller”
The silence of grammar. The silence of morning fog. The silence of a tiger’s paw. Wandering silence. The I told you so silence. The silence of violence. The silence of the catacombs contained in a sheet of paper. The shimmer of summer night stillness silence. The ruins of love silence. The silence of God.
It’s raining at the moment. Calling it rain might suggest a downpour or perhaps a steadiness of purpose, but this rain is too ambivalent for any of that relative cheeriness. This is slacker rain. This rain drizzles on and off all day, turning the landscape into a listless void. It’s hard to even tell the color of the light in such rain—is it grey, or is it a lurid shade of green?
I’ve never been sure, yet I know it well: as I child I stared out of myriad windows into this rain—into the glistening trees that slouched with waterlogged branches—and tried to imagine the sun. It didn’t work, of course; the rain had seeped into my mental eye. Instead of sunlight, the inside of my skull grew lush with moss. Forests sprang up, haunted by arboriform spirits and carnivorous umbrella monsters. Predatory ferns infected my temporal lobes and burst outwards in Medusa-like fronds, marking me as forever coiled, an absurd Beardsleyan grotesque.
The sun is out of reach. Continue reading “The Fire, the Eclipse, and the Spiders”
I find myself thinking about boredom. Boredom, is a feeling that seems to be prevalent amongst the modern world’s most dominant social experiences of fatigue, depression and various neuroses which are effected in today’s society. It is an inevitable consequence of modern technological advancement where the borders between work and life have become blurred, the world made smaller by the internet, and the news broadcast continuously twenty four hours a day, extending even further into our subjective experience.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 
An Interview with Poet Farah Ghafoor
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
Farah, welcome! Thanks for speaking to me here on Burning House Press. You’re seventeen and not only an accomplished poet, but also the editor-in-chief of Sugar Rascals, your own literary journal for teens. What is it about poetry that calls to you? What role does it play in your life?
Thanks for having me!
Poetry has always been the perfect outlet for my joy, anger, sorrow, and opinions. It means that I can come home after a long day, usually tired, and turn my emotions into something beautiful, something that other people can enjoy and connect with. A relief from the tedious busyness of life, reading and writing poetry forces me to slow down, spend some time in other people’s brains, and relish in the incredible complexities of language. Though it’s occasionally a little draining, if I don’t write for a week, I start to suffocate with words.
The adventure of poetry really calls to me, too. I love the tough questions, defensive answers, confessions, secrets, glorifications, histories, judgments, and other elements that poems can present in a condensed form. I love how you can control this kind of adventure. I love how you can use language to its limit. I love how this kind of raw, pristine communication is of endless potential. And I love how a poem can truly be anything.
Continue reading “An Interview with Poet Farah Ghafoor” →
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