Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Welcome to Joseph Milford!



This afternoon I'd like to publish Joseph Milford's selections from his epic Tattered Scrolls and Postulates, the first volume of which is composed of 100 ten-lined prose poems.  He is currently working on the second volume of this epic.  As he explained to me: "[b]asically, I intend to use it as a vessel for narrative and experimentation for many years while I write other projects and prose. It is based upon a man, initially, who was going through a divorce but was suddenly, or possibly, abducted by some alien force and returned to his reality with visions and a an all-encompassing knowledge of Southern folklore, history, science, alchemy, spirituality, philosophy, astronomy, and so on. The book deals with the tensions of knowledge and power and knowledge and helplessness in an attempt to pursue ultimate wisdom through internal and external exploration."  Below are three of Joseph's prose poems.

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Photograph of Melora Creager by Simon Law



 24.

i found a cello of you in a cave and played as hard as i could and died and then you anteloped.
you made pottery when the empire burned. you burned fiddles under the cairn for the kiln.
i was swallowed whole by a whale-wasp. i asked if it was a god or goddess. it fucking laughed.
i had so many paths attached to me--like i was a broken sewing machine clogged with thread.
she walks by with a strategic strand of her hair dyed like a DNA braggard. she evolves upfront.
i killed all of my heroes. we were all Odysseus. listening to the same old gorgeous roaring oars.
no machines allowed. no humans.  no seltzers. we coiled into new furs. we ignored all the stars.
being torn sideways is nicer than being torn wideways. they recover violence. a great pear grows.
most of us quit hoping. we ate value meals. a pegasus flew from a super-sized meal and ate gods.
you pickle things. we all do. put the vagina in a jar with salt. a way of aborting fruits for men. eat.

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25.

how many times will a judge snort his Scotch while a young hot woman knows his weak wife?
overheard a student say she could "suck a quarter out of a traffic meter"; walked back to office.
in the belly of the elephant was the birdcage in the cage was the fear of raptors and rodents.
a mite crawling along the spine of a feather would taste cat's blood later on whiskers of a dog.
SUV hemoglobin pumping assholes into urban organs cellphone calls in ballet around skylines.
mode on node off to annotate otherwise certification for the Promethean holograph mech-tech.
rain-splattered gazebo in parking lot students negotiate pot tempting K-9's and camera mounts.
falling through flipcharts into pixels down through molecules and bubbles the guts of crystals.
I had majic orca eyeball for oracle but dropped it in fryvat it sizzled prophecies in terrible rasps.
a green-spotted horned slug covered in slime glistening crawled over the opaque slug of lead. 



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Photo by MrTinDC

26.

collapsing corrugations and jumping from vaporizing peaks they disentegrate into pulverizilles.
i had enough grease in my hair to get out of the ligatures and crawl to the canoe to tail you.
i once sprayed some lizards at my uncle's house in Florida with bugspray to watch them die.
dropped from high altitudes into deep waters to be spit from geysers and ride on the zephyrs.
interested as he was in secret pentagrams and circles he was easily and discreetly disposed of.
secret doors were under his tongue where languages lurked like virgins upon sacred grounds.
wild boar are not to be tampered with for death lurks here in Arcadia and the babe has a fever.
waiting for you is leaf in the drying cement during your parents' divorce it changes everything.
we wallow in this material instead of creating places for heavenly wallowings. of sleaze i sing.
a fearless core. we just want to be core. we are more like zucchini blossoms. we become fruitious. 



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Joseph Milford is an English Professor in Georgia and his first collection of poems, CRACKED ALTIMETER, was published by BlazeVox in 2010. He is also the editor of Rasputin: A Poetry Thread and the co-founder of BACKLASH PRESS. He has published 100's of poems in a myriad of journals and hosted The Joe Milford Poetry Show, a radio podcast, where he archived over 300 interviews, between 2006-and 2013, of Canadian and American poets.

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My husband is in the front room, working and playing Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come, so I'll post a couple of selections from that CD.

First is "Focus on Sanity":  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxUXu8GmUC8

This is "Peace": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJULMOw69EI

I have to play some Rasputina as well.

This is "The Olde HeadBoard" complete with cellos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVsF2whuzIM

Here is "1816, The Year Without a Summer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxeXHMHOcqQ



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