towards by Minha Choi

Web Team member Minha Choi shares a poem.

In her bedroom, the four walls nestle us safely away from the space. We start by laying down the pillows on her bed next to each other, side by side. The slight chills cause goosebumps to tiptoe quietly all over me, bits of little little sensations I can feel

and there is nothing in this room except me, her and the in between

facing each other, I stammer something about her being poetry, but really what I meant to say is that her eyes are much larger than mine, approximately, maybe no more than half a centimeter wider, both horizontally and vertically, and the irises, brown and tinged, intersect the eyelid and waterline exactly at one point and nowhere else, and now that I’m closer I can notice how her eyelids fold into many layers and deepen still when they smile in the corners, like I’ve seen on thousands of others that have faced mine, sockets of her eyes sunken so that her nose stands out more in contrast, everything about her face a contrast, a skin darker than mine, a shade of brown that complements the lightness in her eyes, shade of things that I’ve seen in my life - comb patterned earthenware, earl gray milk tea with two seconds of heavy cream, wood furniture from Brewster’s Café, my tan back in 2016 a day after the beach, her smile lines form a parenthesis around her lips when she notices that I’m staring at her features, so I don’t look away when the parenthesis are joined by bigger ones shadowed into a trail, laughter lines that accentuate her softer cheeks, mirrored by the crease between her smile and her chin, all while my hands make their way to her jawline tracing up to her ear, right below a head of thick, cropped hair that fades at the edges and falls around her brows, shaped into a long arch that decorates her face solemnly and charmingly with strands of hair, that face that looks young and old, wanting and waning, casting me a look that I’ve never seen before and always hoped to see more of, a look that mirrors strangers, lovers, families, those faces that I’ve seen somewhere at the end of a space and the beginning of another, which focuses my attention back to her lips, her lips, her lips, thinking about the time when god I wished she was a boy, god I wish those lips were a boy’s so I could kiss her, wishing that I could see her no more than an inch away, instead of from a distance from across the stadium, so that I could see those eyelashes and count them, so that her features won’t be blurred worlds away, so that I could see the whites of her eyes more clearly, the way they showed in the dark like glow in the dark stickers on my childhood bedroom’s ceiling, like childhood like I’ve never experienced before, until she places her hands on my waist, and suddenly I have the urge to close my eyes but I don’t, and instead watch her half lidded and focused and wanting and searching for the hems of my shirt, her hands sliding under the rough edges of a shirt that I’ve worn for so long that I can feel the threads unraveling and undoing, static like small lightning bolts shooting down on every second of my skin that comes in contact with hers, her jaw tense, small lines marked in between her brows like focused exclamation marks, and suddenly the swelling can be felt between my legs and the questions are answered, me and her separated by a sliver of nothing but space, space in between that holds the what ifs and what abouts and what the fuck is happening right now, enclosed by a gentle push from lets say, the wind, and the rest of the effort is focused towards enclosing the endless spaces that seem to appear between her and me, two mouths tilting, an act that can be described as none other than desperate, tried in despair because everything else has failed us, the blissful embarrassment of wondering where my hands should be placed, how my legs should be parted, and despite everything we’ve been through my eyes are open, even when they’re no more than a single fraction away from her eyelids, and so when I lean towards you and you lean towards me, when we towards and towards each other and finally close into one another, is that collision love?

“AW.” by Jessie Sun

Web & Event Team member Jessie Sun shares a poem written in Florence last summer.

I got tulips from the market on my way back 

Bright orange

Surrounded by the little yellow on the edge 

I washed the beer bottle we left in

the garbage can last night

and put the tulips in 

“AW.” perfectly fit 

-

I should learn how to walk instead of getting in so many accidents every time

i am on the street

“AW.”

I hurt my knee

and my jaw 

I had some wine and went back home 

for some first- aid spray

World spinned

Am I drunk

“AW.” 

Oh, I fell

- 

Walked into a coffee shop

Espresso

Iced americano

Latte with oat

I’m not creative

That’s all I would get

“Have a good one!”

“AW. Thanks, u 2”

I always wonder if people really 

wish me a good day

Or they’re just saying  

It’s not my culture

I don’t fucking know

-

“AW.” I always just take it

it will not pass quickly enough by Ranina Simon

Poetry Editor Ranina Simon shares a poem about wishing to belong (to a city; to a person) as easily as two old Chinese fishermen.

your youth betrays you

doe-eyed in someone else’s coat

breaking your thousand-yard sulk 

for the men who have crossed this bridge more times 

than the express trains

so while you play chicken with everyone’s footsteps

daring the runners to shove your back

into the east river

they’ve inhaled enough of the churn to match 

your drowning gasp

on their four-limbed commute

(two wheels, two legs)

over the floor that’s more river than floor

past the railing getting strangled by some brooklyn wind 

the wheeled one pedaling a languid stroll

the legged one walking with spokes for shins

remember that this water’s mostly salt 

as you inspect their passing haul

(four poles, no fish)

you’ll feel one step closer to the spray lapping 

at the bottoms of your boots 

when the high tide swells in your eyes 

because his hat tilts the same angle as 

his hat

over liver spots

and his hands clutch the handlebars the same way 

his hands 

wield the poles 

and he could burn a trail down the grates 

switch a gear and let the skyline blur

the clouds get caught in his crow’s feet

the air roaring with the waves

but you’re crying because he won’t 

and the river infects you like you wish the city would 

each gray hair bleached in a dollar’s worth 

of soy sauce and pizza grease 

holes torn in jacket pocket seams

loose change tumbling

(three quarters, two dimes

the pennies multiplying)

until the floor stops rumbling 

because the men have reached solid ground 

at their snail’s pace 

an arm’s length 

the same time 

to keep their line of conversation slack

their bloodless hooks waving goodbye

to your dry, stoic back.

An Interview with Poet and NYU Alumna Sophia Le Fraga

West 10th Poetry Editor Michael Valinsky speaks with Sophia Le Fraga about her recent work, the strange vocabulary of the Internet, and what we can expect to see from her soon. 

MV: In light of your newest work, IRL YOU RL, what is your stance on the way language has evolved since the beginning of Internet? Is this development a good or bad thing?

SLF: When I was at NYU, I majored in Linguistics, which studies the science of language, and covers, to a certain extent, how language functions in society as well as how it evolves. So, I don't really think about language evolution in terms of good or bad, or at least not anymore. 

When I started studying though, I was really concerned with prescriptive grammar and with "conserving" language, which I put in quotes now because I'm kind of laughing at myself. I used to be all about purism in language and grammar, and was interested in institutions like L'Académie Française, for example, and the ways in which they're concerned with not letting too many Anglicisms into French… You know what I mean, things like that. I thought that this task was really important, and still understand the intentions behind language preservation, but I've come to love and embrace neologisms in American English and other things like that.

For example, the words "A/W," "buzzworthy," "derp," "emoji," "FOMO," "selfie," "TL;DR," and "twerk" were just added to the Oxford English Dictionary this year. I had to look up half of them, and type most of them 3+ times because autocorrect hasn't updated. I think this is totally awesome. The Internet is evolving, changing the world around us, making us evolve — and it logically follows that it's making our language evolve and adapt accordingly, too. 

MV: Your book plays with Internet language -- why do you think this 'type' of expression is worth exploring? 

SLF: I'm super interested in the way people express themselves with what they say and with what they don't say. I'm also interested in the way expression changes over time, and more currently, the way people express themselves in our time. Since texting and chatting and Facebooking and Tweeting make up such a big percentage of the ways in which we converse nowadays, I wanted to explore the language and structures we use to signify the things we mean in these new media. 

I mean, I'm not sure that this "type" of language is the most important thing in the world, what with the situation in Syria and Miley Cyrus at the VMAs— but from a linguistic and poetic standpoint, I suppose it's just about as important as everything else. 

MV: There's been a lot of controversy around the intentions and authenticity of conceptual writing recently, with articles both advocating for and denouncing it -- how do you feel about appropriated material, even if it is part of your process?  

SLF: Like you said, appropriating material is part of my process, and I RL, YOU RL is basically totally not mine (thinking about Creeley, "Was That A Real Poem Or Did You Just Make It Up Yourself"). So if you're asking whether I'm pro or anti appropriation, I'd have to say I'm pro. But I did write a non-response to said controversy in the form of a shuffle-able Tumblr you can visit here: http://poetryslastwords.tumblr.com.MV: Can you speak a bit about what was at the core of IRL YOU RL's genesis?

SLF: Unlike I DON'T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET, I RL, YOU RL was more of a compilation than the culmination of a project. I'd been hoarding a lot of pieces made from material I had gathered on social media, pretty much since April 2010, and it had just been like, sitting in folders on my desktop (not just one folder, because I'm poorly organized). And, I don't know, I guess I could have kept going until it all bulked up more or until I was happier with it or, you know, forever, but I had a sense that the project was done and that I wanted to move on to other things… so yeah. That's I RL, YOU RL for you. 

MV: As you said, a lot of the material in the book was appropriated or found; I’m very interested in the way one hierarchizes information. How did you choose your found language, was it arbitrary or were you ‘looking for something’ in particular?

SLF: I wasn’t really looking for much of anything, but I’m attracted to anything that makes me laugh or, you know, “feel”. Thinking of Diana Hamilton, another NYU alumna, “everything I felt was felt first by the Internet” —I like to cull social media and other platforms for language that help me better express the things I don’t have to say.

MV: Your writing has always been interested, entertaining, emotive and compelling, anything imminent in store for us?

SLF: I’m working on a pronoun project called Sophia Le Fraga’s Second Person, but trying hard to go back into exploring different media, and different realms of the written word. I just wrote a thing using only the semantic definitions of verb classes, and am working on a photo-collaboration with some Tisch alumnae that will potentially be called “Ecriture Féminine”. A mixed media group project called I HAVE OFFENDED EVERYONE is something else to look out for.

--

Brooklyn-based Sophia Le Fraga studied Linguistics and Poetry at New York University. She is the author of I DON'T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET (2012) and I RL, YOU RL (2013). Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, and throughout Berlin and Spain. Her writing has appeared in Lambda Literary Review's Poetry Spotlight, Coconut, and Lemon Hound, among other publications.

 

 

A Snowed-In Review of "A Little White Shadow" by Mary Ruefle

By Amanda Montell Mary Ruefle's "A Little White Shadow" may not be breaking news amongst poetry readers; but, when the weather outside is frightful and you're in the mood to stay cozily inside, rediscovering your own bookshelf can be just as exciting as diving into a stack of new-releases.  Ruefle's 5-by-4-inch book of erasures, so small and sweet you could dunk it in your coffee, represents what I think is the genre of erasures done right.  Ruefle takes the base work, a mysteriously arbitrary book from the 19th Century, and with her WhiteOut pen in hand, breathes a haunting life into each tight page.  "A Little White Shadow" (also the title of the erased work) is enchanting visually, with its antiquey type face, tea-stained parchment, and textured streaks of WhiteOut, which appropriately cast their own shadows down each page, leaving only a few careful words.  The paper alone, with all its high production value, counts for a lot of the specialness and intimacy of the erasures.  I experience Ruefle's book like a piece of visual art almost as much as I do a collection of poems.  A pocket-sized feast for the senses.The reader can't make out the work's original text at all, which gives "A Little White Shadow" an unapologetic vibrancy and sense of emotional purpose. The pages, though pretty, are sparse, with no titles, and sometimes less than a dozen visible words. This petite, pared-down style gives the poems a haunting wistfulness.  In one poem, everything on the page is shadowed-out, save for a few small words scattered throughout the last three lines:

It

was my duty to keep

the piano filled with roses.

Simple, direct, and ghostly erasures like this pervade Ruefle's tiny tome.  By creating long shadows of white space on the page, she makes excellent use of the erasure format in order to create suspense.  Forcing the reader's gaze to fall down the entire height of a page to reach a poem's completion contributes to the eeriness and tension.  The book's reoccurring unnamed character of "she" has a similar enigmatic effect.  By the time you arrive at the final page of "A Little White Shadow," it sort of feels as if you've just read an old, quixotic book of a stranger's secrets.  Personally, I have respect for any poet who can make me feel such an emotion, regardless of whether her pen was filled with ink or WhiteOut.So, in the few weeks left until West 10th's next issue is released, if you're feeling bored and restless with nothing to read, you might rediscover Mary Ruefle's "A Little White Shadow."  This teeny book may not keep you busy until April, but it can at least get you out of the snow for a while.